Inspiration or copying? How much can you draw from other music before it stops feeling like your own creation? – from Dennis DeSantis ‘Making Music’ (2015) 1
As a producer, finding your unique voice often involves navigating a complex relationship with the music that inspires you. Every song you hear becomes a part of your subconscious musical vocabulary, shaping your creative process. But how do you strike the right balance between drawing inspiration and risking imitation? The key lies in understanding that all creativity is influenced by what has come before. Great artists – like Picasso, John Lennon, and Led Zeppelin – have openly borrowed ideas from others, demonstrating that “stealing” concepts can fuel innovation rather than hinder it.
Active listening plays a crucial role in this process. It encourages you to absorb and analyse the music around you, allowing you to identify the elements that resonate with you while infusing them with your own perspective. By embracing the essence of your inspirations – whether through samples, loops, or even your own past ideas – you transform borrowed influences into something uniquely yours. Letting go of the fear of originality can liberate your creative spirit, enabling you to produce music that is both authentic and innovative. In this post, we’ll explore how active listening not only enhances your production skills but also fosters a deeper connection to your art.
Solution: Create a template of attributes for your own work
To harness the power of inspiration in your music production, start by listening to the piece that captivates you – often and with focused attention. Dive into the track, analszing it layer by layer and element by element, until you can compile a comprehensive catalog of its attributes. This catalog will serve as a template for your own creations.
Focus on key musical attributes: sound, harmony, melody, rhythm and stereo information. For each of these, jot down concrete observations about what you hear. While you can incorporate notation if it feels right, remember that your aim is not to recreate the original but to capture its essence. Think of this process as building a framework or scaffolding that highlights what makes the piece inspiring to you.
Your catalog’s detail will depend on various factors – your listening skills, the complexity of the source material, and how much time you invest in this exercise. What’s crucial is that your catalog provides enough insight for you to create something new without constantly referencing the original work. This allows you to infuse your music with the qualities you admire while forging your own unique sound.
Example for a catalog of sound attributes
Let’s take this minimalistic gem from Temudo on Klockworks as an example here, but feel free to choose a song you like and that aligns with the genre you want your production to fall into. Using this template should get your production in the right direction of the style your aiming for
After listening carefully and analysing layer for layer you can decompose the track into these kind of elements and attributes:
- bpm: 141
- Sounds: subtle 909ish kick, compressed pulsating bassline somehow related to the main sequence, filtered saturated synth sequence (saw wave-ish) with room type reverb, subtle stereo shaker panned left and right, 909ish closed and open hi hat in the middle with quite some reverb and delay, subtle 808ish ride in the middle
- Main sequence: 16th notes repeating over 2 bars (with one beat silence between 3-4 & 7-8)
- Melody: call and response scheme (first bar higher, second bar lower)
- Rhythm: classic 4/4 drums with varying clip lengths on the 16th shaker/hi hats creating polymeter
- Arrangement: additive arrangement: One musical phrase consistent of a 16 bars section. Track starts with main sequence and kick, slowly bringing in more drums one by one while automating hi hat decay times. At main “drop” everything drops out except kick and main sequence.
With this template of attributes you can now guide yourself for your next production. It’s specific enough to steer you in the direction of the original, but not detailed enough to copy it exactly. That’s the whole point of such a template. Use it as inspiration and create something new with your own unique touch!
