One of the obvious challenges for a weekly music challenge is to be able to generate content week over week over week. Everyone has weeks where the inspiration just flows and sometimes it just dries out.

I am curious about everyone's approach to getting inspired for a new track. Where do you get it? How do you get started? Do you start on your DAW? Do you record random sounds on the TV or around you? Do you get riffs appearing into your mind or does it happen while fooling around your instruments? I'd love to hear more about you approach the challenge of making a weekly track!

Some weeks I'll have a rhythm or melody in mind that I can work out on an instrument and use to begin a piece, but other weeks...there's not a lot in mind. In those cases, I'll pick something arbitrary and begin: maybe come up with a little syncopated rhythm, and get that down on a MIDI drum machine. Or maybe just a tempo that feels right, and play bass or guitar against it, or some similar approach.

I find that I don't often spend a lot of time looking for "sounds" anymore--I might start with a preset and tweak it, or leave it alone...or start with the plain sound of the instrument, get the notes down, and tweak sound later. It's easy to get lost in "finding a sound so I have an idea," but I find I'm more productive if I don't look for ideas in the timbre of whatever instruments I'm using.

I almost always start on my DAW, but sometimes I'll have a melody or rhythm in my head and try to get it down.

I don't play any instruments well (see my other post on the topic) so often I'll just look at the piano roll and draw in something that I think will sound good. Yes, I will actually sit down with my mouse and click in notes in patterns that I'm familiar with. It sounds insane, but I've managed to get more comfortable with this over time. (I know some REALLY good musicians who enter all of their notes like this - one guy I know can crank out a 5-minute, almost fully-produced track with multiple sections and development and glitch and effects in a little over an hour with the mouse).

If I don't really know what to enter, I'll noodle around on my MIDI instruments for a while, almost always recording. Though I'm not really proficient in playing, I know enough to be able to do some basic scales, some chords (not at the same time). I'll record it in, clean it up in the piano roll. It's almost always useful to keep recording even if you're not really sure you are ready because something might turn out good and then you can keep it. If not, it's super easy to just toss it out and record something else.

One thing that I learned from doing a lot of compos is that it gets you into "write stuff mode" really quickly. You kind of get some visualization of what you might want to do as soon as you see a theme. I try not to think about it too hard anymore. I sit down and it's mouse to screen and hands to keys.

Now FINISHING tracks once they've been started? That's a whole other problem.

i'll look up a scale or something to work with and play some chords i guess on my guitar, and i write stuff on a text editor. idk what to do when im stuck though