How and why to keep a listening journal (and a template to get you started)

Guest post by Sayana. This article originally appeared on Soundfly’s Flypaper

If you’ve dedicated yourself to learning music, you may be taking courses, watching tutorials, or working with a mentor to practice every day. Every one of those things can be an essential turning point for you, but another key component of learning music that both aspiring and practicing musicians often overlook is active listening.

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Tips For Increasing Your Creativity

All musicians work differently when it comes to playing, writing, and coming up with new material. Some people have specific routines to get into the right creative headspace. Others wait for inspiration to strike before they dare to do anything. 

But no one is immune to creative blocks. 

And creativity isn’t something that can be taught.

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How Music is Maximizing Your Productivity

Listening to music has been a crucial part of our global culture development since the beginning of time. We listen to music to celebrate, to mourn, to run and to improve our mood. But have you ever tried listening to music for productivity?

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High Notes: How Intelligent Artists Seek Further Inspiration

Artistry isn’t the easiest thing. Making great art isn’t something that you can simply do on command. It’s a process that calls for a lot of thought and care. It’s a process that requires a degree of “magic,” too. If you’re a smart artist who wants inspiration that can assist you with your work, then you should look into various helpful routes right now.

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Getting Your Solo Music Career Started

This article by Kenneth Estrada y Santiago originally appeared on Soundfly’s Flypaper

Over the last 15 years, I’ve been part of seven different musical projects. I’ve played in all kinds of bands: a shoegaze trio, an experimental metal duo, an electronic pop group, an indie rock band, an ambient octet, a punk rock quartet, and a German teen pop group.

I ended up leaving all of them. Why? For various reasons, sure, but all with the same thread of ambition attached: I had a vision for myself and my own music making that these projects weren’t entirely satisfying. I wanted to write my own songs. But most importantly, I didn’t want to fight for every single idea I had in my head anymore.

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4 Ways to Spark Inspiration And Break Through Writer’s Block

When you write for a living, every now and then you will fall into that infuriating slump known as writer’s block. Writer’s block isn’t only for authors or bloggers; musicians can also find themselves lacking words and inspiration.

Inspiration doesn’t always easily fall into your lap, and sometimes you have to seek it or recognize it in different ways. Next time you find yourself lacking the words you’re looking for, try one of these solutions to spark that next song.

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Six Steps To Successful Songwriting: 45 Tips From 45 Famous Songwriters (And One Not So Famous)

My ongoing music blog has carried the overarching moniker of IT ALL STARTS WITH THE MUSIC for some time now. It’s a lofty notion, touched with just the right amount of vagueness to seem proverbial.

 Recently, however, I’ve had to take that notion off the shelf and boil it down to its granular form. The result? It actually all starts with the song. Music is a wonderful thing, granted, but what really brings the emotional reaction home to us all is THE SONG. Music is way too general a term and it’s incredibly subjective; but a great song is a great song. There are thousands of talented musicians and composers in Santa Monica alone making great (OK, maybe just good) music, but only a handful of great songwriters.

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Creativity in Constraint: Exploiting the Boundaries

If one were to Google “This Is Your Brain On…”(fill in the blank), they would find everything from drugs, to football, to Jane Austen. This Is Your Brain On Music spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Empathetic humans have a basic need and survival tendency to understand ourselves, and our behavior. Music has proven to be somewhat of an outlier and unifier simply due to the capability for a universal method of notation and expression. The expansion and sharing of music leaps from country to country, from people group to the academy and back again like wildfire. In culture, it is often a greatest common factor.

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Songwriting 101: Why Originality Matters

If you’re a musician, you probably get asked whether you do original songs or covers. And as unassuming as that question sounds, it’s actually a hornet’s nest buzzing with speculation on your intent, ambition, and talent. Do you have your own thoughts? Do you have something engaging and identifiable to say? Or do you just echo the ideas of other writers?

Are you an artist or a mimic?

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Building Context for Your Creative Work

Why do you make music? Write books? Make films? You might know, you might not. Either way, you do it for a specific reason. Maybe it’s to explore. Maybe it’s to affect other people. Maybe it’s to inject a little fun and excitement into your life.

That reason gives your creative work context. So does your interest in sharing what you do. If you share your work with your family, that’s context. If you share it with your friends and acquaintances, that’s context, too. If you share it with everyone you can, every chance you get, like an Energizer Bunny of sharing, that’s context, as well. And if you keep it to yourself? That is a context all its own.

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Brainstorming Doesn't Work

Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

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Artistic Efficiency: How to Create More and Get Out of Your Own Way

Eight years ago, I left college with a Bachelor’s Degree in Music. Untested and honestly, quite naive, I spent the next three years using money from designing websites freelance to ineffectively tour as an artist around the country, gigging myself into over $6k of high interest credit card debt. Embarrassed and defeated, I stopped writing, I stopped playing music outside of my home, and my answer to “what do you do?” begrudgingly changed from music to websites.
 
Fast forward to today and I’ve been debt free for over 2 years.  Within that time, I self-funded my own full-length record from cash and recently started a music marketing company to promote independent artists. I took 2 months, wrote/recorded and shot a video for one song a week about anything my blog readers submitted and released them all for FREE, and I’m currently in the process of booking the most extensive tour I’ve ever played.
 
How did I do it? I want to show you and show that you can too with 5 simple rules.

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Great Artists And The Music Industry Banana

Kurt Cobain blew his head off, even Martin Mills has a Maseratti and Amy Winehouse’s blood is not on Island Record’s hands.

The music industry is a strange thing. Full of a lot of mushy stuff that just loves being squished into its tight little cubicle alongside all the other mushy stuff.

James Blunt is the suburban front lawn of artists – there’s a song, there’s an album a cover, there’s a hit, there’s a car.

Most great artists are like the annoying neighbour that ignores your invite to the neighbourhood barbecue, the one that keeps letting his garden grow slightly wild, the one who ‘doesn’t care’ (but really does).

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Avoiding Avoidance

Do you ever dodge your creative work? Say, your practice time arrives, and you race off to do some chore. It might be a chore that you detest, but now it calls to you. Then, instead of refining your music, you start cleaning the house or doing whatever. If that scenario sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Artists of every sort contend with avoidant behaviors. Why do we sidestep doing what we love? The answer often stems from the nature of creativity.

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