Software-related writer's block

maybe I should start trying to make rock music.

Yeah, this happens to me plenty. It's just that the first phase of writing something is great: total blank-slate freedom, playing with sound, and constant excitement as things start snapping together into nice little loops. The second phase is really confining, though -- you have all these elements, and there are a million ways you could go about putting them together, and the putting-together can be kind of busy-work, and half the time all that busy-work leads nowhere and you have to go back to the building blocks and try it a different way, and ... not nearly as fun, especially when elements you liked alone don't work easily together. Phase three -- whooshes and fills -- makes up for it, but it's hard to get to!

I'm stuck in this kind of rut lately, too. The best way I've found around it in the past has just been to pull out the guitar and develop the songs away from the computer. That way, when you sit down to start sequencing, you have the plot already roughed out, and you can concentrate on the fun part where you get to actualize it.

this is the story of my life-- why it's taken me two years to come close to finishing even a 4-track demo

I seem to have more success when I get the oxygen 8 going and do some sort of improv over the track, but I often listen to it afterward and just think it's cheesy. I borrowed a guitar from a friend of mine and started trying to do more rock/metal type stuff, but I've never been much of a guitar player and again my stuff sounds too cliched. One of the things on that Oblique Strategies site says not to be frightened of cliches, but I don't want to make music that I wouldn't like, and I am really turned off by cliches and easily recognizable formulas. My friend tells me that I'm too hard on myself, but damn it, what's the point of making music if I'm not contributing something new?

By the way, thanks for that Oblique Strategies site. I'm taking some of those things to heart.

If this happens, it's time to walk away from the console and put some time and space between you and the track in its present form. When you come back to it, not only will what you've already got sound fresher, but you'll be more ready to develop it more (and/or change around something you didn't realise you didn't like). This applies to all stages of recording/mixing/producing a record.

With my stuff I'll usually work one part out completely before moving on to the next, rather than doing the skeleton thing. That way, with the best songs, I feel the inspiration to finish the song just to get that great part out there. Of course, that usually means my songs are a little uneven.

Actually, the longer I spend away from a track, the harder it is to get back into it. This is partly a result of the Reason setup, with all those patch cords and modular interfaces: give it long enough, and I've forgotten how the thing even works, so I have to spend hours taking the chains apart and figuring out which signals are going where.

The thing about cliches (and "boring" things) is that if you have the constitution for it they can get you over the hump -- you can at least use cliches to map out the structure of the thing, and then go back through and work from there. All of those Oblique Strategies seem to be about this sort of thing -- using conventions or even bad ideas to get a bit of an anchor, so you're working from something rather than floating in a void of possibilities.

This is something it took me a long time to get my head around.

Anyone can come up with a decent sounding riff or motif in a software environment, given time. After a while one can probably do it pretty quickly. It is the connecting of two ideas. Creating something that works as a whole that is the challenging part.

With straight up rock/pop music, the formula is quite simple and most of us are so used to it, it comes naturally.

With good loop based music, there isn't really a simple formula as such. I find its always best to implement some sort of 'system', go read up on Reich and Glass and Part and Gorecki on this one. I usually come up with this system first and then get to the notes on the page thing. Once your have all your notes in place, I simply re-arrange what I have got, to make it feel less like a piece and more like a track.

This is what attracts me to microhouse and that sort of stuff so much, the music is all about these kind of formulas, whether intentional or not (i get the impression a lot of them can do it so well because of the amount of time they've spent dj-ing/dancing)

In my opinion fiddling and noodling and wanking about infront of the computer isn't going to result in something that is organic, where as a sudden burst of inspiration of how a track could sound, in its entirety is. Once you have this flash, you run for a pen and paper, draw some pictures or whatever, the computer is the tool you use to create your idea, not where the ideas happen.

Anyway, thats a basic take on my current understanding of it all.