 One of the worst parts of short articles, memes, and the rest of today's internet culture is that we rarely hear all the amazing details within these stories. The part of the story left on the cutting room floor is usually an idea that was being tinkered with in the creator's head. Often this tinkering was happening both consciously and subconsciously since it's pretty boring to show a person thinking in a movie. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about how you incubate good musical ideas. Hi, I'm Jesse Kennan, a record producer, mixer and mastering engineer, and this is MuseFormation. Noted smart guy Albert Einstein once said, creativity is the residue of wasted time, meaning that you need to spend a whole lot of time developing ideas that go nowhere to make any great creative achievement. A great idea never comes to anyone that hasn't been doing some research or spent some time getting inspired. It's not possible to understand how to execute an idea unless you've been tinkering with related concepts. Even though we can't always trace where ideas come from, we know they don't come from nowhere or the blessing of a muse like some dorks who spend too much time in a hot yoga studio cooking their brain like to say. Ideas go through an incubation period where your mind isn't thinking about the idea you had in a way that's evident to you. Instead, your mind is toying with the idea in the background to make connections that can later lead to an epiphany or when you realize an idea. The semi-distracted state where you're partaking in menial tasks allows your mind to nurture your hunches into epiphanies. This is why ideas often dawn on you in the shower or before bed. The apple falling on Newton's head when he discovered gravity was not some divine epiphany. That's a myth. Instead, he was tinkering with an insane breath of work and physics, and this was the chance encounter that stimulated his mind. A famous case of this is Charles Darwin talking as if he thought of this theory of evolution in a sudden epiphany. Historians studying Darwin later went through his journals to find he was slowly coming to this epiphany over months and months of research. The same went for Tim Berners-Lee when he invented what would become the World Wide Web. For 10 years, he was making concepts that were close to the hyperlinks and connectivity the World Wide Web has built on today that we all know. Most great ideas get developed over time. The idea for a great song may not be so great when you first build it, but with a few more great ideas, this could be a song that becomes your best work. Great work won't fall on top of your head just by chance. It involves development. Oftentimes, this development is called incubation, so how do we get your brain into incubation mode? Author Graham Wallace, the art of thought, was one of the first attempts to define how the creative process works. One point he made in the book is that usually a great idea has a lead up to it, and then after the initial idea is formed, there's a subconscious period where the idea incubates and you finally see how to put it into practice. You shouldn't expect that once you get a great idea, it will be fully formed or immediately executable. Continuing to take an inspiration while tinkering with your ideas helps your mind develop these hunches into more realized ideas. You can even nurture the incubation of ideas by using a variety of techniques. Musicians are regularly accused of being lazy. This video channel often does it, but what looks like laziness is often incubation. To incubate ideas, the brain needs to be in a state that's not fully engaged while playing around, while paying slight attention to another task. This is evidenced in University of California research, which found that engaging in simple external tasks that allow the mind to wander may facilitate creative problem solving. Many scientists believe the brain in an unconscious incubation mode can actually do more complex work than when you're consciously thinking about a creative work. This means taking a break when you get frustrated can give you the time you need to develop an idea further. Taking walks, exercising, commuting, and the odd state you're in when you're half awake in the morning or at night is when so many of the best ideas come out since your brain is in a state where it can subconsciously nurture your ideas. This semi-distracted mindset allows us to be engaged in enough thought to give our brain the resources to figure out the problems going on in our minds and later form an epiphany. A University of Central Lancashire study found doing boring activities such as attending meetings, commuting, or tedious writing exercises nurture divergent thinking. The bad news is video games and TV are too engaging for the brain to incubate. You can't force your brain to incubate a thought. All you can do is devote time to activities that encourage incubation while seeking out more inspiration that may nourish an epiphany. So lay off the friend's reruns and call of duty if your ideas aren't pouring out. But is there anything you can do to make incubation happen that's an actual action you can take? Incubation can also come in the form of consciously tinkering with ideas. A University of California study found that daydreaming allows your mind to go into incubation, which may also give you a clue as to why you see your favorite musician staring out in the space all the time. It's said that Mozart was judged to be quiet and aloof since he never had his attention in the room he was in. When reviewing his notebooks for his scores, he had dramatically fewer crossouts than the majority of composers since he was constantly developing ideas in his head. In this day and age when we're constantly looking at our phones for entertainment, we should remember that the time we spend in a state of low attentiveness is the time where our minds could play with the ideas we've been accumulating to develop them into bigger ideas. In the age of constant distraction, it becomes less common to sit alone with your thoughts trying to connect things. Breaking the habit of looking at your phone anytime something isn't holding your attention can be crucial to the nurturing of good ideas since the practice can be effective for many artists. 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 0 to 10,000 fans and the other is on how you make songs you're more happy with. Or you can hit the subscribe button below and stay tuned as I have tons of tips for musicians.