Unlocking your creativity

If you want to unlock your musical creativity, your first step is both very simple and also the hardest thing you will ever do.

Are you ready?

If you want to unlock your musical creativity, you have to start taking seriously the ideas that you already have.

Chances are that you’ve already started to “dabble” with your creativity, but you never took it anywhere because you felt your ideas weren’t good enough. Perhaps they felt under-developed, or you thought you should learn more about theory or composition first.

It’s natural to be a little embarrassed of our first ideas because we recognize they need work, but by disregarding them we’re sending ourselves a message that we’re not actually open to generating new ideas.

And your creative spirit is not going to give you new ideas if it doesn’t think that you’re going to listen to it.

If you keep dismissing all the ideas you do have, your creative spirit is going to be like, “Well, what’s the point of even trying to come up with ideas? She’s not going to take me seriously anyways!” and stop pushing new ideas forward. This is commonly felt as “creator’s block” but I see it more as a result of “creator’s refusal.”

To turn this around, we need to let our creative spirit know we’re ready to listen. The best way to do this is to decide on a way for you to collect your ideas. Then commit to jotting down every idea that comes to you. You could sing your ideas into a voice recorder, write your notation on staff paper, or video record yourself playing. Anything that gets the snippets of musical ideas out of your head and into the world, with an attitude of positivity and receptivity.

(For myself, I use a combination of the Notes app on my iPhone to jot down feelings and phrases that I might like to develop in song later. I also have a collection of staff paper pads and travel-size notebooks to write down musical notation.)

The amazing thing is, once you start a habit of allowing this flow of creativity it doesn’t stop — it just keeps getting stronger! And this is what I want for every musician :)

So be encouraged! Take your ideas seriously, and more ideas will come.