 Just as you'll only be as healthy as what you eat in your exercise regimen, your creative output is dependent on the inspiration you take in and how regularly you perspire, just as you perspire during your workout. Since the inspiration is a kid to nutrition in this analogy, your music will be the product of what you listen to the most. If it's what everyone else is listening to, you're more likely to make music that doesn't really strike people as being worthy of taking note of. If you're taking a new inspiration from uncommon places in music, it'll bring on inspired work. In this video, I'm going to talk about how to think about the inspiration you take in as a diet. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a record producer, mixer, and mastering engineer, and this is Muse Formation. So I know when I talk about an inspiration diet, it can be off-putting since music's supposed to be fun and taking in music you don't love can be inauthentic. You're probably thinking, but what if I only like rock or pop that's on the radio? Well, that may be resonant to you, but to make music that has new heights of resonance, you'll need to dig deeper. To find new ways to express the emotions in you, you need to find new ways to explain how you feel in music. The palette of only understanding what's currently popular won't allow you to discover the most resonant expressions of your emotions. Most musicians who only enjoy what's on the radio are that way because they've yet to do the research to find more tools and inspiration that can be emotionally resonant to them. They're simply not digging deep enough. Instead, they settle on what's the easiest to consume by flicking on their car stereo rather than taking the time to get to know the many other influences their favorite artists have consumed. I mean, really, do you think your favorite artists are listening to the radio and that's it? I'm not saying to make good Afrobeat music, you should be super-facely listening to classical music or EDM on a regular basis. This research doesn't need to be diverse in genres, but if you're going to stick to one or two genres, make sure you know these genres exhaustively. This could take effort for some and isn't always easy. Simply turning to the classics or what's popular won't be enough. You need to search until you find influences that are resonant to you and explore them to become fluent with all the tools that you're disposable to express yourself with. There's a balance to strike between being authentic and doing this superfluously. Forcing repeated listens to Mahavishnu Orchestra to get better musical ideas can be good for some musicians, but forcing that influence into your music when it has no resonance with you will lead you to making an inauthentic drivel. Being weird for weird sake or inspired for inspired sake won't lead to music that anyone wants to hear. We won't love everything we ingest, but we need to continually find what we can take from what we find resonant. It's healthy to try new inspirations in an exploration to find who we are, but forcing yourself to get inspired by music you think will give your music a great depth doesn't make it emotionally resonant and make music that people want to hear. There's a famous saying that gets tossed around saying that you're the product of the five friends you hang out with the most. This also goes for musical influence. What you listen to the most largely shapes the songs you write. With years of music listening, this can be diminished down to what you listen to over the course of your life. But for beginners, this is especially crucial since you don't have years of accumulating influence standards and palette to draw from. Since we know inspiration is research, we need to recognize that you should be conscious of the inspiration you're taking in as if it were a diet. When I'm trying to get inspired for a record, I try to consider my inspiration diet to nurture myself so I'm sufficiently ready to perspire. This is what I consider so I'm on the best possible diet for a project. The greats versus the local trash. For every one of your favorite local groups doing something amazing that the world may never hear, there are 10 other bands in the scene who aren't that special but get listened to far too much by many musicians. I've seen so many musicians get lost and listen to their friends music that's just poorly done versions of great bands. This particular affliction goes especially for bands who only listen to the other bands they tour with. It drives their standards down which makes them think subpar ideas are great, instead of getting used to the high standards they need to achieve what the best musicians have done in the past. Then there's this dichotomy of bells and whistles versus solid songs. At some records an artist can be filled with inspiration for songstruckers and hooks, but lacking in how to do the moody soundscapes they hope to explore. I'll often go on an inspiration diet depending on what a band needs from me. If a band needs help coming up with soundscapes, I may end up listening to Mars Volta Clinic, The Talking Heads in Chrome to get ideas on what they could do. If they need help with song structures, I'll listen to artists with inventive structures. If a band has a mind for the bells and whistles of music, I may try to get into the mind of their favorite songwriters to make sure we stay focused on solid songs so I fill in their blanks. Consider where you feel deficient and consciously take inspiration that will help nurture what you need on each project. Then there's listening to your favorites versus fresh new music. It's easy to get lost in your favorite records since getting to know them is some of the most important listening you can do to figure out what you love about them. Plus, it feels great to listen to them, but you also need to be taking in new records to gain fresh new ideas. Even if these records weren't recorded in recent years, you need to continue to get inspired by listening to new source material. The inverse can be true by focusing on new records versus exploring your favorites to figure out what makes them tick. If I give a concentrated listen to many of my favorite records, even after listening to them for decades, I can still find new details from them to get inspired by. But there's nothing like fresh new ideas to get you inspired from music you've never listened to before. I find the biggest prime musicians have getting inspired is that they aren't challenging themselves to take in new music. The author Ray Bradbury once said, If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, short stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, and music, you'll automatically explode every morning like old faithful. I've never had a dry period in my life because I feed myself well. If you're feeling drastically uninspired, it's time to go down the inspiration family tree of reading interviews with your favorite creators to see what inspired them. Perhaps click on the related artist section of your favorite group Spotify or see who Metacritic says they're similar to. Observe this family tree to see who your favorite acts are influenced by. Check out who they're compared to on review sites or research the acts they wear shirts from. Make a playlist and give each song a few listens to try to find their merits and dig deep and really put in the effort to find new inspiration. Thanks for watching. Am I missing anything? Is there any other way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I want to answer them so leave them in the comments since I answer every comment in every post. I hope you liked this video and if you did please like, subscribe, and get notified. And I'm going to be breaking down the concepts in this video along with how to promote your music and how to make songs you're happy with in the future. I have a Facebook group linked below that is only helpful information. No playlist or con artists. Only artists having helpful discussions allowed. If you want to learn more about me, work on a record with me, or check out any of my books, podcasts, or anything else I do, go to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on all the socials. One last thing, there's two playlists here. One is on how to grow your fan base from zero to 10,000 fans and the other is on how you make songs you're more happy with. 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