 Welcome to another art of composing daily vlog. You will have noticed that there was no daily vlog yesterday. I like to at least take one day off a week. Yesterday was Sunday so I figured it was as good a day as any. And today I thought I would talk about something that happened to me today and it relates a little bit to the episode where I talked about my daily routine but it's slightly different. So today I had big plans. I was gonna sit down and try to work my way through a bunch of cues on the latest episode of my soap opera. And what I found is that ideas just didn't seem to be coming today. And I know a lot of people in the past have asked me about writer's block or composers block whatever you want to call it. And it's it's one of these subjects that everybody's gonna face at some point in their composing career. So you're gonna sit down and just feel like nothing's happening. And I thought in this episode I just talked about a little few of my tips to deal with it. So first thing to do I think is to ignore it and attempt to compose as best as you can. And that's really what I did today is regardless of the fact that you know after a while I felt like no really good ideas were coming. I still sat down and I tried to do the work and just get something down. Now today I was working directly in my DAW, Digital Performer. So there's no writing and that's something I'm gonna talk about in a second. But I at least made a solid effort, sat down. I had to do some more spotting on this episode. So that took up a significant amount of time in the morning. But once I finally sat down to actually write music I gave it my all. And even though I wasn't a hundred percent happy with what was coming out it was something. And the benefit to doing that and just pushing yourself and working through these periods where you feel like you've got writer's block and you feel like nothing good is happening is that a lot of times you just have to work through the bad ideas. You have to sit down and figure out what it is that you really don't want. And a lot of times it actually takes composing the music to do that to figure out what you don't want. So tomorrow I feel like I'm probably going to come to this project and to this episode with better ideas. One because I will have spent more time just thinking about the episode watching it, spotting it and that kind of stuff. But also because I spent the time to try to get something out of my brain. It's like sometimes you get a buildup of ideas and they're really good and you just know what's gonna work for a scene or whatever it is. I mean it just could be music not connected with film scoring or anything like that. You just get a good idea of what you want to do. Other times you sit down and you don't really know what it is that you want to do. But it's kind of like uncovering a statue in a block of marble. You kind of have to chip away at it and work through the rough edges of your music in order to find really what the core of it is and what the real idea maybe you're trying to get to. Now the other thing that I wanted to talk about though is some strategies that I'm going to use tomorrow to try to overcome this writer's block. One thing I like to do obviously is if you're really coming up against like you've worked for a number of hours nothing's happening then maybe it is time to just call it for the day. Today I felt tired and I don't know if it was the eclipse or what which was at least over here was a little underwhelming because we only got like 50% of the sun blocked and we didn't have any cool eclipse glasses so we just took a cereal box and poked a hole in it. It worked. I mean we got to see the cool little like half moon looking thing but it wasn't very impressive so and it got a little bit dark and I don't know like a reddish color around here so I'm going to say that that's the reason why I couldn't compose today that's that's my excuse. But I didn't even know where I was going with that. Nonetheless I took a break right for the rest of the day I kind of did some other things it's not that I completely stopped working I just I just focused on other things that weren't necessarily writing music and and sometimes you just need to do you need to work through a little bit of the difficult period of not knowing what to write and then just call it for the day get a good night's sleep and then come back tomorrow. Now tomorrow one of the strategies that I'm going to use is sometimes I find that better ideas come when I'm composing by hand and in digital performer particular I like to map out my cue and then go into the quick scribe which is just the notation part of the software and print out blank staff paper for the cue and the benefit of that is that you will have mapped out all your hit points and you're actually looking at states you know you're not just looking at a kind of this infinite piano roll that all of us have to look at when we're scoring stuff you're looking at a certain number of bars until you get to the end at a certain tempo and I found for me personally that I can I can comprehend what I need to do musically a lot more that way so particularly the form of my music I can comprehend it a lot better so so that's one strategy I'm going to use you know another strategy is just kind of trying to imagine what other music will work that I haven't written you know almost like doing my own temp score but it's you know not not for editing purpose editing purposes or or anything like that it's not an intense process I'll just go into iTunes I'll play the film and then at the same time I'll just click play on some piece that I think is going to work and I'll just see how they meld is is the orchestrational choices in this piece do they work for this scene or you know is the tempo right is the mood right whatever it is and you can play around with musical ideas that way really easily and and I found for me it's it's very effective now sometimes I've even mapped out things like for one cue that I did for a short film I took Barber's Adagio for strings and I mapped out his form and I saw how that would fit into the the film I was doing and how I can match his form and in the types of phrasing he was using I really got in depth on it other times I just kind of want a general feel and that's all I'll do I'll just play it a little bit in the background but those those two strategies getting back to paper and pencil and the piano and and trying to find some other music that fits don't feel like that that makes you you know a cheater or anything like that as a film composer our job as film composers is to elicit reactions from the people watching and one of the best ways we can elicit reactions is by referencing sounds and music that people already know I mean there's a reason why you can go through movies and say oh this is this composer taking from this great classical composer or you know this is from this sound right here it's because our job is not necessarily just to write pure you know complete you know abstract music for the sake of writing music it's it's to enhance the story enhance the emotional content things like that so you know kind of to sum it up had a tough day composing I want to be honest with everybody you know everybody's gonna face it I face it you'll face it and you just have to not be down about it everybody gets writer's block sometimes and the critical thing is to sit down and still write some music even if you throw it away the next day even if you hate it more often than not I find when I take it take a rest from it I come back the next day I actually like it it just needs one or two things that are tweaks so a lot of times you think you have writer's block it's just emotions or being tired or whatever it is stand up take a rest like usual and then figure out a way to rewrite something in a different way you know if you've got to sit down like I said with paper and pencil do that if you've got to sing it along and and you know record an audio track with you singing and then delete it afterwards I mean there's lots of ways you can go about this so hopefully you enjoyed today's vlog and I will see you tomorrow be sure to sign up for notifications and subscribe on YouTube and if you're looking to learn to compose head over to art of composing dot com