A Powerful Tool for Composers

What's up, composers?

Today I want to talk about one of the most powerful things that composers do to make their music great. It's something that anybody can do, does not require any prior skills or knowledge, and you can start doing today. Let's get into it!

The super-secret superpower of composers is consistency.

There are a lot of different components to consistency and a lot of different ways in which you can leverage the power of consistency to make your music really, really powerful. For me, consistency is everything. Now, there are some people who are completely the opposite, and they have a much more free and open, unpredictable compositional process that is more conducive for their own creativity.

That doesn't really work for me. I need kind of a consistent habit so that my projects feel like they're moving in the right direction.

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a very powerful statement as it relates to consistency, and that's “never break the chain.” For Seinfeld, that means sitting down for a period of time that he defines and writes jokes every single day.

I have my own version of this, and it's just to “honor your code.” For me, that means to work on my music every single day for 1 hour. The rules are very simple. And in order to stay true to myself, I must follow that code.

Obviously, life happens. Sometimes it’s not possible to do it every day. But it's a philosophical ideal. That's what I'm aiming for. That's what I'm trying to achieve as a composer. And if I can honor that code, then I can expect to get better as a composer and for my music to be better; for me to stay connected with the music on a much longer time scale, and for the music to feel truer to my compositional voice.

So what I would recommend is that you establish what your code is. Does it look similar to mine? Maybe it’s that you only compose ten minutes every morning right before breakfast. Or half an hour right before bed. Maybe you do it on your commute to work, so the amount of time depends on how long you’re in the train or bus. It could be that you define your output in seconds or minutes, or if you’re using music notation, number of pages. Even Stephen King does this—he has a daily written word count of 2,000 words.

Think about what works best for you and your daily routine. If you think you don’t have time, you may not be looking hard enough. Look for pockets of time that you already have and be objective! Is there a 5-minute slice of time that you normally spend on your phone? Reading the news? Scrolling Instagram? Could you replace one or more of these slices with composing?

Tip #1

Now, one powerful method that you can use is to define how long you're going to work. To say that you're going to work every single day can be very open ended and daunting. For some, that can potentially be a deterrent for wanting to work every day.

If you just make a decision about how long it's going to be, like in my case, it's one hour per day, then it makes it a little bit more of an achievable goal.

The goal with this is not actually to write great music. It's just to write music. One thing that I learned after doing this for a long period of time, and for sort of like keeping a record of what I was doing on a daily basis, was that one hour was what I needed to “maintain” as a composer.

Just like with a diet. You have a certain number of calories that you consume in a day to maintain your weight, or a certain number of calories to gain weight, or a certain number of calories to lose weight. One hour a day was what I needed to maintain. It wasn't until I started doing an hour a day or more that I started to actually experience breakthroughs in my music.

Tip #2

So you kind of have to figure out what your “maintain time” is. What I recommend that you do first is to commit to an amount of time on a daily basis and do it for a week, two weeks, a mont, and track how much you do at the end of this time period. Do an assessment and say, “Every single day I worked ‘X’ amount of time, and on these days I happen to work a little bit more and I felt like I was making a breakthrough creatively.”

If you do it for at least 30 days, it will give you a very good sense of what amount of time is needed to maintain, what amount of time is not enough, even to maintain--where you're actually losing your compositional ideas—or how much time you need to make a breakthrough in your music.

Tip #3

One trick that you can do is you can stop in the middle of a sentence, so to speak.

You can stop in the middle of your music, in the middle of a phrase, in the middle of a section, in the middle of the page, and sort of leave it open-ended on purpose, so that the next day when you sit down to work, you sort of have this gap which is sort of like easy to jump into and continue from. This is a creative trick I learned from the writer Ernest Hemingway.

One of the things that we can't stand as human beings is when things don't have closure. So if you kind of hijack that psychological tendency that we have, you can actually jump into your music and continue from relatively the same momentum that you left the previous day.

 An alternative to this would be at the end of your session, you can make a to-do list for the next day.

This is something that I've found to be insanely effective when I compose. When I get to the end of a composing session, I’ll say, “well, there are still things that I wasn't able to accomplish today that I can at least start with tomorrow.” I'll have just make a list of the lowest hanging fruit that I need to start working on immediately the next day.

And so that sort of like bypasses this period of time at the beginning of this session, especially in those first 15 minutes, where you can gain momentum a lot faster because you're not asking “what now?”

That concludes the things that you can start doing today to start getting better as a composer. I hope that this really valuable and practical for you.

I hope that you can start doing one, two or all of these things to start being more creative, to start being more in touch with your music. And if you like these kinds of blogs, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter so you don’t miss any updates from me.

Check out the video version of this blog here 👇🏻

Happy composing!

If you’re serious about composing, check out my FREE on-demand composition masterclass by visiting https://www.mathew-arrellin.com/free-class

If you’re even more serious and you know you want to take your music to the next level, click here to book a FREE call with me today.