How to Be Creative in Music: Practical Tips That Work
How to Be Creative in Music: Practical Tips That Work
Musicians frequently search for how to be creative in music when their internal well of ideas runs dry or when their songwriting begins to feel repetitive. This stagnation is often not a lack of talent, but a breakdown in the systems used to generate and refine musical thoughts. Creativity in a professional or semi-professional musical context is rarely the result of a lightning bolt of inspiration. It rather links directly to routine structure and consistent exposure to new material.
Divergent thinking is the ability to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. In music, this means moving beyond the first melody or chord progression that comes to mind. To maintain this cognitive flexibility, musicians also have to manage their mental energy. Cognitive flexibility is your ability to think in new ways and switch perspectives.
For example, listening to content that inspires and encourages you — specifically, listening to a focused podcast to motivate building a fulfilling life — can actually help prevent decision fatigue that often stalls the creative process. The steps and tips below outline specific tools and methods that support daily music output in measurable, evidence-based ways!
Table of contents
- 1 1. Getting Rapid Insights into Music Theory and Creativity with Nonfiction Bestsellers
- 2 2. Using Interactive Music Theory Practice
- 3 3. Building a Writing Routine
- 4 4. Capturing Ideas in Real-Time
- 5 5. Studying Process Discipline and Improving Routine
- 6 Applying New Tools and Methods for Consistent Output
1. Getting Rapid Insights into Music Theory and Creativity with Nonfiction Bestsellers
A common barrier to musical creativity is a lack of new conceptual input. Many adults struggle to find time for long-form reading, with average daily reading times often falling below 20 minutes. For a musician traveling between rehearsals or waiting for a studio session to begin, finishing a 300-page book on music theory or artistic discipline is often unrealistic.
The Headway app addresses this by providing short nonfiction summaries of books centered on creativity, nonfiction music bestsellers, habit formation, psychology, and more. These summaries are designed to be consumed in 15-minute windows, making them ideal for transit or short breaks.
By extracting one specific framework — such as a new approach to artistic discipline — and applying it immediately to a composition draft, you can break cycles of idea repetition:
- The platform is structured to support these brief learning bursts.
- It features curated categories with proper author attribution and an audio mode for hands-free consumption during setup or teardown.
- With over 55+ million downloads and recognition as an App Store Editors’ Choice, the tool provides a way to integrate microlearning about music into a busy schedule.
2. Using Interactive Music Theory Practice
To understand how to be creative in music, you need to have a functional grasp of the basics of music, theory, and history. However, traditional textbooks often present theory in a vacuum, making it difficult to recall during a live session. However, the effectiveness of spaced repetition and microlearning (the practice of reviewing information at intervals) is outstanding. The method improves long-term memory retention.
The Nibble app and web platform apply this principle through those same microlearning modules. The platform offers interactive lessons that take less than 10 minutes. If you review chord structures or scale patterns on the train before a rehearsal, you are more likely to recall those structures instinctively during an improvisation session:
- The interface includes a daily lesson cap to prevent cognitive overload and a progress tracking dashboard.
- By using these short sessions to reinforce theory, the technical aspects of music become part of your muscle memory, freeing up the brain’s executive functions for more complex creative tasks.
3. Building a Writing Routine
Creative output is often a volume game. James Clear’s ‘Atomic Habits’ argues that significant results come from the accumulation of small, consistent actions. This is particularly relevant for musicians who struggle with irregular output. The book has reached over 15 million readers, largely due to its focus on the habit loop — a model derived from behavioral research.
In a musical context, this involves “habit stacking,” or tying a new creative habit to an existing one. For instance, you might commit to writing a single 15-second riff immediately after your morning coffee. By scheduling a fixed, 15-minute writing window every day, you bypass the need to feel inspired. Consistency increases the volume of ideas, and a higher volume of ideas naturally leads to a higher frequency of high-quality breakthroughs.
4. Capturing Ideas in Real-Time
The working memory model, famously explored by researchers like Alan Baddeley and supported by MIT studies, suggests that our ability to hold onto fleeting information is extremely limited. If a melody occurs to you while you are away from your instrument, there is a high statistical likelihood that it will be forgotten before you reach the studio.
The Ableton Note app, for example, serves as a digital sketchbook to mitigate this loss. It allows you to record melodic fragments or vocal motifs the moment they arise. These 30-second sketches can then be exported directly into a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for further development. This process ensures that the “raw material” of your creativity is preserved, reducing the frustration of lost ideas.
5. Studying Process Discipline and Improving Routine
Rick Rubin’s ‘The Creative Act: A Way of Being‘ became a New York Times Bestseller by focusing on the environmental and internal shifts required for sustained art-making. Rubin suggests that creativity is a matter of tuning oneself to the environment.
When you encounter creative doubt during the development of an album, reading a single chapter of such a text can provide a perspective shift. Rather than focusing on the end result, Rubin encourages focus on the immediate session setup. By adjusting your physical environment or your approach to a single recording, you can bypass the mental blocks that arise from overthinking the final product.
Applying New Tools and Methods for Consistent Output
Understanding how to be creative in music is less about finding a magical source of inspiration and more about managing your cognitive resources. Success depends on structured exposure to new ideas, short and focused learning sessions, and the application of deliberate constraints.
Additionally, you can use Austin Kleon’s ‘Steal Like an Artist’ concept that introduces the concept of influence mapping — the process of documenting several different artists and isolating their specific structural traits. Instead of imitating one artist, you might take the chord progression from a jazz standard, the drum timbre from a 1970s funk record, and the vocal structure from a modern pop song.
Rewriting a chorus using a borrowed structure from a completely different genre diversifies your songwriting. This is another method you can test today. Just transforming influence into a practical tool for diversification!
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