After a couple weeks on vacation and recovering from a nasty cold, I got back to creating music.

I met with my coach on to review one of my song ideas, Quirky Digestion (and randomly generated name). The big revelation? I realized even when I think I’m developing a song idea I often stay stuck in brainstorming mode. I keep jamming out new ideas instead of developing the good ones I already had. Alex helped me identify the main “characters” in the track—the core musical elements that I wanted to be the focus. They were what I already knew were the most interesting ideas, but the confirmation was nice and, more importantly, the prompt to stay focused on those better ideas.

I pared down the gear on my desk to get more focused on the Develop phase. I centered the Presonus MIDI controllers because, duh, they work so well with Presonus Studio One. I put away the Polyend Play, which was great for brainstorming initial ideas. But it’s not going to be good for developing ideas—not interactive enough. At least not now because of my familiarity/skill with it. Right now it’s better to either finger drum or directly edit the MIDI.

I brought those main characters into the timeline and started building around them. I asked questions like, “Where does this want to go?” and “What else does this want?” Rather than trying to recreate the live mix from Loopy Pro or jumping straight into song mapping, I just grabbed instruments—mandolin, electric octave, bass—and recorded ideas that supported or evolved what was already there.

It worked well. An arrangement started emerging, even though I wasn’t explicitly trying to compose a song structure. It felt nice to just grab the mandolin, electric octave, or bass and record a new idea in the context of the other ideas to keep the arrangement and orchestration growing. It went pretty smoothly.

I got myself to do way more finger drumming than I have done in the past. I did several instances of finger drumming to create drums that fit more organically with the bass parts, as well as create fills. I think making fills through MIDI editing would have taken a lot more time. And there wasn’t much useful MIDI from the Polyend Play variations. So printing all Polyend Play patterns I created during my jam sessions to MIDI wasn’t a good use of time. (It seems like the Polyend Play is good for (for me) brainstorming. However, it’s not great or efficient for developing and arranging ideas. It’ll take more time, or I’ll need to let it go as a tool, since I can get a similar stimulus from drum plugins like DrumComputer and Captain Beat Epic.)

Here’s my track Quirky Digestion as it stands now:

Now let’s see if I can take this approach to another song idea. What I need to do is find my main ideas, then bring those into the timeline ASAP and grab an instrument (or MIDI drum controller) to bang out ideas that support or evolve those characters. I need to be careful not to actively try to arrange and think about song structure while developing the ideas. It happened quite naturally with Quirky Digestion, although I certainly got distracted into very clear arranging tasks. In other words, I might be coming up with good developing ideas around the main characters, but still not see how they fit together. But not seeing how they fit together becomes a prompt for developing some ideas. That’s where the fuzzy boundary appears between developing ideas and arranging them.

The tricky part is knowing when I’m developing ideas versus when I’ve slipped into full arrangement mode. It might just be in how much mousing around I start doing; if I’m mousing more than recording, then I’m too far into arranging territory. And, of course, the process is iterative: develop ideas, arrange ideas, review ideas, realize the song structure is lacking something, develop ideas to address the missing element, and so on.