Reignite Musical Motivation Using 5 Simple Tips

5 Tips To Reignite Musical Motivation

 

5 Tips To Reignite Musical Motivation From Somebody Who Has Been Precisely Where You Are.

I’ve been a musician for a long time… about 15 years now. People are always amazed when they find out because sticking with what most consider a “Hobby” is hard. and that is very true. There have been SO many moments where the motivation needed to crank out one more hour of practicing, make one more beat, or just open up Logic was just not available. Period. Anything music related (generally) has delayed gratification. So getting started is ALWAYS going to be the most difficult part. We feel tired before even picking up the guitar because it’s some form of work for our nonconscious mind. So what are the 5 tips to reignite musical motivation?

1. Get inspiration from loops

If you aren’t using loops yet, this might be all you need. Loops are like fire starters. Grab your fire starter, throw it into your EMPTY session, grab ONE other instrument to play around with, and 9/10 times creativity will start flowing. I use this trick extremely often because I’m personally pretty lazy. I don’t like making drum grooves, or toppers. I can find AMAZING ones pre-created on SPLICE to just drag and drop into my tracks.

Once the new loop is in, I just go ham on my piano or guitar. I can tell you that most of the songs I’ve written follow this process. Some of my BEST work has even occurred when I didn’t feel the creative juices that day. Just get enough strength to grab that first loop.

2. Re-listen to the favorite song, progression, or lyrics you’ve made/learned

There’s nothing more appealing than a bit of self-love to get you out of a rut. Listening to your old music in a POSITIVE way or playing your FAVORITE song on your instrument is a great way to feel motivated because it links happiness with your ability to produce or play.

For example, whenever I’m REALLY not wanting to practice my guitar I’ll play Fransico Tarregas Adelita. This song has a lot of meaning and importance in my life, so going back and playing it reinvigorates those feelings of excellence, hard work, and excitement. It’s also just a straight-up beautiful little song.

So go ahead, give that motivation tool a try if your feeling unable to practice or get in the zone.

3. Watch some tutorials

Okay, so tutorials are a bit of a dangerous slope for a couple of reasons. When used in an effective way, they can be a tool to set you on a path for growth… and growth tends to be an intrinsic motivational tool. But what’s the dangerous side of tutorials? There are two in my mind.

The first – Don’t let somebody else’s success drive your motivation further away. You have no clue about the amount of work they put in to make that tutorial. In fact, I’m sure they have been in a very similar position of feeling a lack of motivation.

The second – Don’t think that just watching is enough. You need to take action and perform whatever is in the tutorial. I’ll often slow down the tutorials to .25 speed and really take my time learning something new and ingraining it in my process.

The GOOD from tutorials comes from WANTING to learn a VERY specific new tool or technique. This FOCUS will help your creativity bubble up again. It’s important t

o limit yourself to ONE topic and really dive deep. A few of my favorites would be sound design – making a super saw, guitar chords – learning ONE amazing progression or mixing related – learning how to use delay in a creative way. There are millions of more things to learn… but these are decent things for thought.

4. Start small

You can feel motivated to create music by taking baby steps. I often find myself trying to take these large bigfoot sized steps that are just impossible to reach. This is an INSTANT motivation buzzkill. So instead, flip that feeling around and you begin to ACHIEVE small amounts of momentum or internal success. Momentum and success are amazing motivators.

For example, instead of saying ” I will produce one song this week”  say “I will write an 8-bar piano progression this week” – an 8-bar piano progression can be achieved much more easily than an entire song. If you’re trying to practice more change “I will practice my entire song” to “I will practice 12 bars from my song” – just be sure it’s a meaningful 12 bars that you know you need to review a bit more because that growth and progress is motivation.

5. Just do it

Finally – in the words of the great Shia LaBeouf (or Nike I guess…) “Just do it!”. You can’t argue with this philosophy. Sometimes motivation WON’T be there in ANY capacity. And at the end of the day, the hard truth is that the most successful people still TRY when they aren’t feeling motivated in any way. With an emphasis on trying. Give it shot, a genuine try to get into the zone. The above tools list great to help receive that motivation. But if nothing else you can feel motivated that you tried and just started. Even if your session only lasted 10 minutes.

5 tips to reignite musical motivation: Conclusion

It can be difficult to feel motivated to create. Even the greatest artists struggle with motivation. So take control instead of hoping motivation will strike. Use loops, play your favorite songs, watch some tutorials, start with small steps, and finally just do it. You will become a better musician, producer, or artist by bettering yourself. If you’ve made it this far then I think you’ve bettered yourself :).  So take it easy now and go make some dope music!!!

Also, all my new subscribers are getting 5 beats absolutely free when signing up. Maybe this is the motivation you need to write a new hit track?!?

So sign up below 🙂

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