 The idea that creativity should come easily to those who go on to do great things discourages many would-be careers from pursuing their endeavors since they don't immediately have the attention span or skills to do great work. This thought neglects that many of the skills you need to be highly creative take an immense amount of practice. Much like exercise or weight training, creative skills need to be used regularly and built upon continuously to be able to be used proficiently. Nearly every part of creativity takes practice that eventually gets you in shape to create easily and effectively. In this video I wanna discuss how to look at your different creative muscles and how you can build them so you can become an amazing creator. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon and this is Muse Formation. Musician message boards are littered with questions of how long a session should be or how long it takes to write a song or do a mix but the actual way you should see this is dependent on where you are and you need to work your way up to having muscles where when a song takes 12 hours you can handle it or when one only needs two hours to develop you can tell that's all it needs. If you listen to interviews with the greats in music they talk about how some songs take forever and some are fast birds. You can only know this if you've built up creative muscles that can handle the long arduous processes so you know when to say when and when a song is done. If you watch a recent pitchfork interview of Phineas talking about how him and Billy Eilish built the biggest record of the year you hear them discussing the many muscles they had built up to work on these tracks tirelessly but they also knew when they were done if they didn't need as much work as one that they labored over for 40 hours at a time. They learned so much about emotional iteration in building their songs and it obviously paid off but let's talk about the different creative muscles you need to build. The first one is time. As we were just saying time is a crucial muscle to build. When I first started working in a recording studio doing a six hour session felt like an eternity. Within a year I could do a 14 hour day with no problem. 15 years later sustaining an 18 hour day isn't hard for me as long as I don't do too many in a row. Expecting to jump into 10 hour days in the studio without losing your attention span or getting exhausted is unrealistic. Most of us need to build up stamina for long days of creation. Now let's talk about your artistic attention span. This is one of the most under discussed muscles. It's the ability to even be able to keep track of making multiple great songs at once. So many artists wanna jump into making a full length but they haven't even yet learned how to put enough great ideas into one song. It takes a totally different artistic attention span to keep track of how 12 songs relate to each other other than two. Crafting an album is often best grown by releasing singles which can be wildly different from one another while you find out who you are and figure out your sound. And once you know your personality you can work up to making an EP that fits together and then on up to an LP once you know your artistic attention span can handle it. If you underestimate this just think of how many artists have tons of filler or songs that sound too alike to make a good LP. Yet you like a few songs that you will put on a playlist but you don't wanna listen to their whole album. You don't wanna be that artist. So don't underestimate that this is a muscle that needs to be built up. Now let's talk about arrangements. Most musicians start out learning simple three chord pop songs building up to the ability to remember long complex melodies. To get good at complex arrangements you need to first learn the basics and then continually move outside them until you have a large understanding of how it works. Don't expect bohemian rhapsody to come out of you before you've learned basket case. Now let's talk about building up your comparative skills. One of the biggest parts of songwriting and production is comparing things. There is a certain listening skills for comparisons and even learning how to listen is essential. Producer Eric Valentine has a video on this that is solid gold. But by continuously comparing things you learn the different creative options you have and what feels emotionally right to you and which ones you can avoid. Incorporate comparisons into your daily routine so you can continually get a command on understanding the difference between the tools you have and what you should be using to get your objectives and the emotions you wanna express. Commitment's another undervalued muscle. Committing to decisions is a practice that takes time. At first musicians are uneasy about commitment in case they need to revisit an element of a song. In time as you become confident the decisions you make are right becomes progressively easier to commit. Commitment is essential to good songwriting since your mind feels mass confusion and fatigue if decisions haven't been made. Keeping virtual instruments open and constantly tweaking their details doesn't allow you to focus on a mix. If you listen to interviews with nearly every huge producer they talk about this commitment so they can focus on each phase of the project from demo to production to mixing and mastering and they all require different commitments so your brain can give the attention span it needs to each part of the process. Which brings us nicely to our next muscle which is ego depletion. This unfortunately named term is the idea that every time you navigate through a creative crossroad throughout your day you get more exhausted. Dr. Roy Baumeister discovered this in a study where he stated, your finite willpower becomes depleted with each decision you have to make in each unfamiliar interaction you have to have. This relates to creativity in that every person only has so many decisions they can make without taking a break before they make poor decisions or give up on making good decisions and just make a decision for progress sake. Building up your resistance to ego depletion not only takes time by going through the creative practice but it also takes strategy. By committing to production choices like we just talked about and utilizing templates you spend less time making decisions which frees your brain to sustain its creative fuel. Many life hackers take this to the extreme where they'll have the same breakfast every day to save their brains for making more pressing decisions. While this example is excessive the practice of ridding your life of pensive decisions before creating can help you use your creative power as effectively as possible. Making decisions during pre-production instead of long studio days can make the process of deep reconsideration in the studio more effective. The next muscle we have is criticism. It's hard to hear criticism at first and it's another muscle you need to build. Some artists need a filter at first by having a friend read them reviews to find what's useful and not malicious. In time they can grow to hear that not all of this criticism is valid but calling everyone haters is the opposite of the way to grow. Instead take it at the beginning to build a muscle towards the how to process all the criticism you hear. Our next muscle is diligence. Trusting your instincts and learning to elaborate on your ideas takes practice for everyone. When the going gets hard, you can't give up. Can you imagine how Queen felt halfway through laring the vocals for Bohemian Rhapsody? The vocals were recorded for 10 to 12 hours a day for three weeks straight. But without this exhaustive dedication we wouldn't have one of the most ambitious songs in music. Now you'll probably never go through that arduous process but understand that emotional impact is achieved by focusing diligently on the details. While I often talk about you need to trust your gut to develop songs, at times you can't even hear your gut. New Age hippies talk all day about being present. But it's a real thing. If you're distracted texting on your phone thinking about adult world responsibilities or anything other than your song you'll miss your gut alerting you to problems. When I began to produce records I had a hard time focusing and self misdiagnosed myself as having ADD. The truth was I had to get used to listening intently by exercising a muscle to get better at evaluating creative judgments. In time I had no trouble focusing while learning to trust my lack of comfort when an element of a song felt wrong. The more you can focus the more you'll be able to be alerted to gut impulses that can help actualize your vision of a song. Keep pushing all these different creative muscles like they are a different part of the body that you need to exercise and push them a little bit more each day. One of the best happens when I was learning record production is I wouldn't allow myself to call it a day unless I messed with a tool or a plug and I'd never used before. These days when I do my to-do list for each day I try to put it in something that I'm not familiar with I've never done before so I keep building my skills each day and learn to work these creative muscles out so they don't atrophy. 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 wanna answer them so leave them in the comments. I hope you liked this video and if you did please like and subscribe and get notified for my future videos since I'm gonna 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, playlist or con artist, only helpful information for musicians looking to be better themselves. If you wanna learn more about me make a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do head to jessicanon.com or at jessicanon.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.