In this article Grammy award winning mixer and producer Dom Morley offers advice on getting the most out of studio sessions. Moments of creative inspiration might feel like luck but here are some things you can do to make your sessions luckier.

We’ve all had those painful days in the studio where we can’t seem to get anything done. While there are the obvious house-keeping jobs of editing guitar takes or tuning vocals, a lot of the work in a studio requires some level of creative energy to make it happen. Although this creativity can sometimes seem difficult to find, a bit of planning and thought can give you more control over your creativity than you might think. Here are five ways you can boost your creative self.

Do The Work

My favourite quote about creativity comes from Picasso, who said “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working”. This sums up an attitude to ‘finding inspiration’ or ‘tapping into creativity’ that is common across all disciplines of the arts and creative endeavours. Successful artists put the work in. They show up, they work hard, and then they come back the next day and do it again. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a lot of successfully creative people over my career, and not one of them indulged in ‘waiting for inspiration’ to begin writing or recording. 

The hardest part of this is something I call ‘the tyranny of the empty page’ - the slightly overwhelming feeling when you’re looking at a blank page that must be filled with words, or a blank DAW session that must be filled with music, or an unruly mass of sounds that must be turned into a beautifully mixed song. The best way of pushing past that feeling and getting the creativity flowing is to just start. You can throw away whatever bits you don’t like at any time, and you’re allowed to change your mind along the way, but if you make a start then good ideas will inevitably come to you.

Sleep

While you are sleeping your body may be taking a well-deserved rest, but your brain is just as busy as it is during waking hours - it’s just that different parts of your brain kick into gear while you sleep. As your consciousness shuts down, your unconscious whirrs into action and gets to work making sense of the day. One of it’s tasks is to deal with the nagging thoughts and problems that are still bouncing around your brain (and so haven’t yet been organised and stored away). This is why your dreams are often a random collection of people and actions that are bizarrely tied together - that’s just your unconscious arranging those thoughts for easier storage. This is a creative act on your brain’s part though, and it’s applied to everything that your brain has been working on, including your music. Paul McCartney famously woke up one morning with the melody for ‘Yesterday’ in his head. He told a biographer “I liked the melody a lot but because I’d dreamed it I couldn’t believe I’d written it.” 

Harnessing the power of your brain at night may all sound a bit sci-fi, but you probably already do it. If you’ve ever waited on making a difficult decision until the morning so that you can ‘sleep on it’, then you’ve already used your brain to work on a problem while you sleep so that it can offer solutions via ‘flashes of inspiration’ the next day. 

If you want to live a more creative life, then make time for sleep and take it seriously. Sleep is the most powerful creative tool that you will ever have. 

Walk

In Mason Currey’s book “Daily Rituals” he charts the routines of over 150 incredibly creative people - from Charles Dickens and Mozart to David Lynch and Steve Reich. A very surprising number of these people include a long walk in their working day - often just after lunch - and credit these periods with their best ideas. The principle is the same as sleeping - walking gives the brain a break from the ‘doing’ and a chance at ‘processing’. A run or hard session in the gym is good exercise, but it takes too much of the energy that your brain needs for creative thought. A walk is a good balance of distraction and mild exercise to let the unconscious do its work.

Time Of Day

We all have different times of the day when we are more suited to taking on different tasks. It might be that early morning is your peak time for quickly getting out loads of ideas and then after lunch is when you edit most efficiently. Or vice versa. Or something completely different. One of the best ways to boost your own creatively is to know how to structure your day so you are doing the right tasks at the right time. For example, I can get into a flow state and push a mix on very quickly if I work in the evening - about 7pm to 11pm. I do have a family and a life though, so I don’t get to work in those hours every day, but when I really need to push through a lot of mixes then I’ll work a few evenings and take the benefit of this heightened productivity. Try a few different structures out yourself and assess after a week or two what period of the day is your most creative, and then keep that clear for the work that needs it. 

Embrace Failure

The role of a producer often involves coaxing creativity out of a group of people working together in a studio. One of the biggest obstacles to collaborative creativity is fear of failure and embarrassment. What if your ideas don’t work? What if no-one likes them? Should you really be throwing ideas in at all? The best way to remove this obstacle is simply to throw in lots of ideas, and to be ready to quickly ditch them if they’re not working. If others in the room aren’t doing this, then lead by example and work hard to get everyone joining in. For example, if I suspect that people that I’m working with are holding back then I’ll deliberately throw in an idea that I don’t think will work, just so we can explore it and throw it away - once one person has done it then that gets the ball rolling. Pixar’s Andrew Stanton is one of the most successful writers in Hollywood (Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, etc) and he relies on a method he calls ‘failing fast’. The faster you can fail on an idea then the quicker you can move on to one that doesn’t fail. This is only possible in an atmosphere that embraces failure as a necessary part of the creative process, and not a situation to be avoided. 

I’ve finished by talking about creativity in group situations as I think this is the most interesting and productive kind. Bouncing ideas of other people and building things together is where great leaps in your thinking can occur, so try to work creatively with others as much as you can. To take some words of advice from Albert Einstein, “Creativity is contagious, pass it on.”

More Recording Resources From Dom Morley

Dom is the founder of the Mix Consultancy, a zero risk (money back guarantee) way to get notes on your tracks to help improve the sound. Whether you're an artist who likes to mix all their own work, a composer putting together a pitch on a limited budget, or an engineer who wants a discreet second opinion before sending a mix off to a client - we're here to help.

“I just completed a mix with the help of Dom Morley & The Mix Consultancy. The mix we turned over was qualitatively better than the one I would have gone with on my own.

It's been said that "a mix is never done, it's just abandoned", but the truth is, you *really* do feel a sense of completion and closure having worked with Dom because you know in your heart that you did everything you possibly could to get the best result possible for the client.

The beauty behind the process is that not only do you get a better mix for your client, but Dom's advice contains all kinds of gold that you can borrow and deploy in future mixes.”

Geoff Manchester

From engineering tips to production advice, EQ and compression basics to mix specifics, we’ll give you the information and guidance that you need to take your mixes to the next level. Find out more here

In addition to the one-to-one advice Dom has produced some excellent online courses;

• Everything You Need To Know About Recording Vocals
  Preproduction, DAW set-up, preparing the studio, psychology, equipment. Literally everything you need to know.

• Mixing 101

  This is a short, free, mini-course on the four things that you really need to know in order to get great mixes, and the four things that you really don't!