on daily sketches
one of the results of the recent activity flurry has been the emergence of daily ‘musical sketches’. you can find examples of the sketches here.
the basic approach is that every day before work [and before anything else at weekends] armed with nothing more than a coffee, there is a timed, 15 min window to record a single musical idea or experiment. No expectations, it’s just an experiment - “what would happen if we did this?”, “what noise does this make?”, “what would happen if we chained all these effects together?” etc etc
the thinking behind it is to challenge the perception that you need to be ‘in the mood’ or ‘free from distractions’ or have a special time or place to be creative. these are just excuses - easily exposed by the music sketches. by limiting it to 15 mins and a single idea, it makes sure it’s never overthought or the pace slows. it’s a race against time to see how far we can get in 15 mins. it’s a rough initial sketch, something to spark further inspiration another time. deliberately imperfect and under-formed, an honest response to the daylight before us.
the idea of sharing examples on a weekly basis is, again to challenge the over-thinking and over procrastination, but also role-model the idea that everything has to start somewhere and that by doing this stuff all the time, you open up far more opportunities for it to happen. the phrase “normalise creativity” has become an important one recently. it feels very powerful as an approach to many things.
the impact has been significant. as well as a steady stream of decent new ideas, work (as in the day job] has become more tolerable, as it feels like something positive has been achieved, something [however small] created before the working day has begun.
obviously, it doesn’t need to be music, it could be any creative endeavour. just limit yourself to a single idea and 15 minutes to execute, then repeat daily at the beginning of every day.
everyone has 15 mins spare - right?
try it.