Here is a list of 10 things you can do to improve your creativity and experiment with things provided by someone who attended a workshop presented by Brian Eno. Look at number 1
Brian Eno taught me these 10 lessons in his music-making workshop
1 Boredom is important
âIâm almost sure that [
Music for Airports] would have never happened had I not been sitting in an airport bored,â says Eno â before adding, âand [being] slightly annoyed by German disco musicâ.
It was perhaps a lot easier to be bored in the 1970s before the invention of the smartphone. These days, most of us spend hours avoiding being bored by scrolling through content platforms. âConsumerism is the fear of boredom embodied,â Eno goes on to explain, but we need not be afraid of boredom. The next time you wake up, donât consume anything he suggests â not anything on your phone, not even your breakfast. Instead, see what enters your mind. âSomething will appear,â he says. For Eno, that âsomethingâ planted the seed for one of his best-selling albums.
2 Taking things out is as important as leaving things in
Challenging yourself to remove the main hook or riff in your song might seem self-defeating, but Eno thinks this is a powerful way to open up the rest of your mix and see the potential of each part.
There are two ways it can go: By removing the most important part, you might realise that none of the other instruments are doing much at all. On the other hand, as Eno explains, it might âmake you realise that the least revolutionary part is the bit that youâre hooked byâ.
One thing Eno would do at the end of every
recording session is to create what he called the âfilm mixâ, that is in other words, taking the piece apart, leaving stuff out, and seeing if he could create something with the parts that were left.
3 Push the limits of your parameters
Eno believes that most of the truly interesting stuff happens at the outer limits. For any given parameter, heâs more interested in what happens at the âedges of controlsâ, than the comfortable middle range that most people stay in. After a lifetime of turning the knobs on all manner of studio gear, Eno says, âIâve realised that the most interesting thing about controls is what happens at the extreme end of themâ.
4 Take note of what grabs your attention
Creating good music starts by knowing what you like. At a time when algorithms vie for our attention, he repeatedly stressed the need to notice our thoughts and feelings. Eno often repeated the phrase, âIf I do a double take, I do a triple take.â In a
production context, this means noticing when something feels off or identifying what really clicks â then asking yourself why.
5 Break the grid
Ignoring the gridlines in your
DAW or opting for an unusual time signature are just some techniques Eno suggests for adding unpredictability to your work process.
It was something that he noticed while watching the young producer and his apprentice,
Fred Again.., effortlessly navigate
Logic Pro. Ignoring gridlines entirely, he would start by dropping sounds into the middle of the timeline.
âIf you work in Logic and youâre not a Fred, you tend to work in straight lines,â Eno says, but what is key to Fredâs music is that he ignored the boundaries that constrained most artists and acted more like a âcollage artistâ, fluidly placing bits of music next to each other that completely ignored the grid.
6 Constraints are good
Weâve all felt the urge to buy more gear or invest in some sprawling software mega bundle, but Eno cautions against this. He believes limitations are something that drives our creative thinking and stops us from getting paralysed by endless options. âThe kiss of death,â warns Eno. âIs software that says, âNow you can do anything.ââ In the digital age, self-imposed constraints are essential, says Eno, and goes so far as to suggest ideas like banning artificial
reverb from the studio, forcing yourself to write a song in 20 minutes, flipping a coin to choose your chords or limiting the number of tracks in a session
7 Double the tempo
Alongside his pioneering avant-garde work, Eno has written plenty of chart toppers and produced some of the worldâs most famous bands. Along the way, heâs picked up some recurring tricks that ânearly always make a song betterâ.
One of these tricks he calls the Klaus Dinger beat, also known as the motorik beat. Named after the drummer from Neu!, it effectively doubles the tempo of a song. While working with
U2 on
Beautiful Day, Eno says the song wouldnât gel until he asked the band to try the Klaus Dinger beat. That simple repeating 4/4 beat gave the track momentum and turned it into the hit we know today.
8 Never delete anything
You might just find treasure in the trash, but the only guarantee youâll come across it is if you never empty the bin. That goes for your desktop bin too. According to Eno, he never gets rid of any idea, snippet, demo, or recording, reporting that heâs got thousands of song ideas that heâs collected over the years.
Over time, a well-kept archive becomes a creative library where you can pull out a recording on any given day and pick up where you left off. âI donât ever let anything go out of play, the point about the archive is to keep all the saucepans on the stove.â
In the case that itâs a total failure Eno will still stick to his rule, although he might leave his future self a reminder: âSometimes I will give it a title like, âPossibly the shittest piece of music Iâve ever doneâ.â
9 Find music in everyday life
While living in New York, Eno found himself fascinated with American radio. He would regularly record âshock jockeysâ and shouting evangelists using a boom box and a cassette tape. Comparing American radio to the
BBC back home, he thought, âThis is amazing to live in such a fertile, unfiltered, sonic world.â
This material eventually ended up in the album
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with
David Byrne. As he recalls, âI had recorded this guy off the radio⌠he was stuttering with nerves in a kind of ferventâ, that bit contrasted heavily with the host who replied rather flatly with: âYeah, yeah yeahâŚâ. Taking these everyday recordings to the studio En
10 Polish the turd
âTry to polish a turd,â Eno suggests; itâs one thing you can do with a piece of music you think is completely useless. Itâs an interesting take on a classic cliche.
According to Eno, whatâs great about something thatâs already bad is that thereâs no risk you can make it any worse and this frees you to try something utterly different. These bits that donât become a song on day one might continue to have a life in the future perhaps repurposed into a part for another song. Eno does this so often that he declares with a laugh, âI am probably one of the most prominent turd polishers in the businessâ.
