Inspirational Activities...

When I do a post like this, half the readership goes “sigh. Another process post.” And the other half goes “Yay! Another process post!!!” When I started blogging lo these many years ago (Jesus fuck, has it been 18 years?) I quickly learned that, even though my first blog was about my band and not music tech, and it wasn’t called a blog because there was no name for them then, there was a certain segment of the audience that loved process, and another segment that hated it.

I happen to number myself in the “love it” camp, as declarative statements about gear can get really tedious, in my opinion. So suck it, naysayers.

Anyhow, the one aspect of my life’s work that I really love is the “R” half of the R&D equation, and that’s where we are now with Audio Damage. And the main tool in my mental toolbox for doing Research is, surprisingly, YouTube. For a right-brained person such as myself, the non-linear information firehose that is the YouTube recommended videos sidebar is an amazingly handy thing. I can type “Generative music” in to the search bar, and in three short steps be watching a video from the Nature Channel about how water has memory. From there, it’s only a couple clicks to what I call Costello Land (Schumann Resonance videos and the like, from people that really enjoy fractals). I can’t click away from that hippy shit fast enough, and a few random pokes later I’m watching a video from someone that has made a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to use the L System equations to make music.

In the space of maybe 10 minutes, then, from typing in a relatively random seed, I’ve set all the gates on the right side of my brain to the proper mode for having ideas, and to be clear, I’m not looking for wholesale ideas in these videos; rather, I’m trying to set my brain in a state where it can have its own ideas. My theory (which practice has more or less proved out over the years) is that a given idea is really the result of the ingredients you feed it. My habits to create that idea are sort of like following a recipe that I know works, and while I don’t know how the result is going to taste, or if it will be any good at all, I do know that if I follow these steps, I’ll end up with something edible.

I have a couple other things I do (usually a trip to the public library will get me a whole stack of fodder that costs only time; it’s a great way to taste things outside your areas of interest) to get myself in the right frame of mind, but on the whole, the best thing I’ve found is YouTube.

What do you use to get yourself in a creative mindset? Do you find my method works for you? Would it work for an extremely left-brained person? Or do they need something more linear to engage the gears? (With any luck, we’ll avoid a lengthy Sean Costello treatise on Schumann Frequencies, but I think I’ve tempted fate just mentioning them; I’ll take whatever punishing 3,000 word essay Sean sees fit. Also, water doesn’t have memory. It has impurities. That was a stupid video. But it’s all part of the process.)