 One of your brain's greatest assets is to advise you on interesting treatments to apply to your music. Figure out approaches to filter your ideas through as part of the mastery of songcraft. By writing down what you love about your favorite creators, you can start to understand how to achieve the greatness you admire in them instead of just playing songs that sound like theirs. In this video, I'm going to talk about how you take notes and get to know who you are and what you love in music so you can make it your own just like your favorite creators. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, and this is MuseFormation. Today, I want to talk about a technique that I do pretty regularly, probably about once a year. I go through and I try to think about who has been making music that's resonant to me and how I get my own creations to be more like theirs. The way I do this is I take notes on what I love about each one and then think about how I can apply the aspects of what I love of my favorite creators to what I do musically. The cover of my last book was an exercise in figuring out what those were the greatest impact on my creativity and then I decided to make a visual representation of it. One of the main practices I do for myself as a producer and the songwriters I work with is I try to get us to examine what the five musicians that are really inspiring us are doing in particular that really makes us feel the exceptional feelings we feel when we hear their music. This allows us to think about how we achieve what emotionally affects us in music and concentrate on how we make music that is going to feel emotionally powerful for ourselves. For example, here's what my list looked like as I wrote my last book. The Clash. What I love about my favorite band of all time, The Clash, is their vocals sound like different characters in a movie singing a part but coming from one singer's voice but they sound like a conversation between two different people oftentimes even when there is two singers in the band. Their grooves are either consistently rushing or dragging making for intense musical emotion. They always know what to do to make the feeling right in whether they're choosing to rush or drag or play it rigidly. Making for an intense musical emotion but they always know whether to play it stiff, drag or rush for a perfect groove. The experimental pop producer Sophie has been the person who has wowed me the most with music in recent years. I love what she does for making new emotions with new sounds. I love that her vocals are sung as if they were written to a different groove at times yet they still are such strong hooks it doesn't matter what she puts them under. The vocals are also pitched to a sound like an unidentifiable singer yet still have a character of their own that's totally unique and you know when it's a Sophie vocal. The group Health I think makes some of the most interesting music today. Their vocals are always extremely breathy but they keep a common peppiness to them that makes their intense and abrasive instrumentals listenable because otherwise I would find them way too abrasive. They have some of the most interesting envelopes in music and they take familiar instrument sounds and make them sound totally new by adjusting the envelopes. The 1975 are my favorite band of the last decade. They have a unique ability to use sounds that don't distract from the vocals. There can be so much going on in their backing tracks to their music yet you still pay attention to the vocal. They are the masters of taking somebody else's sound and making it their own. They have a way of doing a unique sense of melody and harmony within their chord structures yet still making it sound all their own no matter whose style they decide to ape. They often do it better than them. The group White Long is one of the most interesting punk bands I've heard. They find a way of having more notes in a song than anyone I've ever heard yet still making it work. The drums are so stiff at times yet they still sound intense and they have huge dynamics from part to part that rakes me feel so emotional when that chorus hits. One of the toughest things in songwriting is when you're stuck on something and so many people do superfluous things like turn to brianino's oblique strategies but those often don't get you to results that give you a lot of emotion that fits the song. Instead I like to turn to this list as the guidance of what I should do when I'm stuck on a song. You can get out of the decisions where you feel stuck using this technique. I think about what the people on this list would do in this situation that's confusing me and reference this list and try to think about it more. Remembering who I love while finding the correlations in their decisions leads me to what I want to do musically and I can apply this exercise to songs, albums, imagery from my music, whatever I would like. One of the best modern tools for figuring out who you are as a musician is to make a playlist of your favorite songs. The songs that have affected you the most, the songs that you keep coming back to. This allows you to return to what continually moves you to find correlations of what you enjoy from musician to musician and song to song. I keep a playlist in my Spotify called Great Songs that I add to whenever I find a song I never get tired of. Whenever I have a problem with the production such as having to reconsider a baseline for a record, I can sit down for an hour or two and get inspired by all of my favorite works to find an inspired solution unique to my own tastes. One of the head's greatest assets is to advise you on interesting treatments to apply to your music. Figure out approaches to filter your ideas through is part of the mastery of song craft. By writing down what you love about your favorite careers, you can start to understand how to achieve the greatness you admire in them. Instead of playing songs that sound like theirs, you can make your own sounds. That's it, am I missing anything? Is there any 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. I hope you like this video and if you did please like and subscribe and get notified for my future videos since I'm going to be breaking down the concepts in this video along with tons of others on promoting your music and how to make music you're more happy with. As well, I have a Facebook group that's linked below that has only helpful information. No one tried to sell you anything, playlists or con artists, only helpful information for musicians looking to be better themselves. If you want to learn more about me, make a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, head to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on any of the socials. Thanks for watching. One last thing, if you liked this video, there's two playlists here with tons more videos that you'll probably enjoy. One's about how you promote your music and the other's about how you make songs you're happy with. Otherwise, you can hit the subscribe button here to see the rest of my videos. Thanks so much for watching.