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Towards Effortless Composing

Yesterday, the biggest issue I faced was getting tense while working on music—literally clenching my jaw while playing. I’m taking this too seriously. I’m currently working on an instrumental song I’ve randomly called “Tasty Message.” I’ve reached that exciting point where I know it has enough interesting ideas and material to become a full arrangement, so I’ve mentally moved it to the “arrange” stage in my project management system. But now I’m finding it challenging to connect these good ideas. Too much good material? Ha! In trying to compose transitions and through-compose from the good ideas to find workable variations, […]

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Workshop (PAST): Practice Creativity and Produce Music with More Ease

Workshop was held on August 12th, 2025 at the Recreational Psychoacoustics Lab in Seattle, WA Description Let’s explore how you relate to your creative work, not just how you organize it and technically produce it. This workshop is both a facilitated conversation about creativity and an introduction to practical frameworks for making music with greater ease and authenticity. The emphasis will be on creating music authentically and effortlessly – understanding how to relate to your unique creativity rather than force it (to be like someone else’s practice). We’ll start by sharing our creative stories and current challenges, then dive into

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Creative Rhythms

The last time I journaled was June 25th. The last time I sent out a newsletter was July 8th. The last time I posted on my blog was July 9th. That’s at least five weeks away from what I define as work—my regular practices for creating. (Do I regret that? No. I feel blessed to have a new home, moving into a dream house with my dream family, and having gotten to a place–mentally and environmentally–of being settled.) If you’ve read my past newsletters or my blog, you’ve probably noticed that a theme in my life is always having to

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Using a track from Gigi and Loopy Pro for frictionless jamming of a new idea

I was playing along to the track Tew Ante Sew from Gigi and was just inspired by the simple arrangement and orchestration that integrates Ethiopian music and electronic production. I was listening to the track because of this article from Hearing Things about what tracks inspire the artist Lyra Pramuk. Then I just wanted to pick up my Epiphone Dot Studio guitar. I realized I should be recording–something I want to do more often when I find myself picking up an instrument and noodling. So I quickly got my iPad and iRig Pro out of my bag. (The gears was

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Creative resistance and finding the right path

Today, I’m feeling some resistance about moving on to the arranging stage of the composition process of my album. I think I am a bit overwhelmed by the number of ideas I created. The transition from Loopy Pro to Studio One has required more effort than I was hoping, which has taken me out of the flow (but probably giving me some good separation, too). And I’m starting to give the process more weight and meaning than I should. Jamming and developing ideas was easy to maintain detachment from the outcome. But now I’m thinking, “is this good enough to

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Gotta be creative? Get back to bass-ics.

When I started working on my second album, I thought I had a sound and a process fairly figured out. My first album, Regretfulnot, was the result of a year-long crash course in electronic music-making—MIDI controllers, virtual instruments, drum programming, sample selection, patch building, and layers of electronic effects processing. Though, crash course makes it seem more intentional and systematic than it was. More like a hodge podge of online courses, following YouTube tutorials, rabbit holes, and working for a short time with an unhelpful mentor and a long time (still!) with a helpful one. I am pretty proud of

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Having trouble managing a creative project?

How do you manage your artistic, musical, or other creative projects? Are you wanting a different way? I’ve tried a lot of different methods for project management in general. As far as music making, years and years ago, my approach was very unsophisticated and disorganized–scribblings across multiple journals (that would get lost and stolen), Word documents with difficult-to-decipher hints at chord progressions, and other random files that were unclear whether they contained a promising idea, bad idea, or something that was almost finished. The point is, I’m sure I lost a lot of ideas and could have written even more

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Principles to be an impervious creative

Today I watched this video from Venus Theory: He cited a new book by music creator Liina Turtonen titled “Creative Confidence and Music Production.” The book and recently losing a freelance gig made Cameron — Venus Theory — think of seven principles to help creatives become more impervious (his words) to the ups and downs of our calling. They are: His points really resonate with me. I don’t think any of them are super new to me, perhaps “act in your nature” is the most new. But they are all ones that are important to me, that I do work

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Trying to be bored more

I liked this video from Jon Makes Beats. The TL;DR of the video is that boredom is the key to creativity, but most of us these days don’t experience much boredom because of the constant entertainment and stimulation provided by the overexcess of media, such as social media, Spotify, Netflix, etc. So if we want to get more creativity in our lives, we need to allow for more boredom–less stimulation from all the media that’s available to us every second of the day. One thing Jon mentions at the beginning of the video that really resonated with me is that

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