chipmusic.org is an online community in respect and relation to chip music, art and its parallels.
You are not logged in. Please login or register.
So guys, I recently began making songs but the problem is that I have no inspiration so far... Therefore I have 2 questions for you:
1. Where do get your inspiration from and how do you turn that into an actual song?
2. Do feelings (for example anger) actually help during this process of creating songs?
I'm looking for a way to get started, hope you guys can help me! 
1. Personally, I get inspiration from listing to my favorite artists/songs, but unlike most, I have never gone into a chiptune with a theme or an idea of what notes/melody/baseline I am going to use, I just sit down and just start writing a melody I like, then build the rest of the song around that. I do however enjoy mimicking (or trying to mimic) the styles of other artists.
2. Yes. For the most part I am a very happy yet realistic person, thus pretty much all of my music is upbeat.
1. I get most of my inspiration from listening to my favorite artists, or events that happen in my life. Melodies and basslines just kind of come to me throught the day, and the they usually reflect my mood. So in a way, the roots of my music are generated by my subconcious...
2. Very much so. My mood tends to fluctuate over time as new things happen in my life, and it is pretty clearly reflected in my music. When I'm happy I write upbeat music, when I'm angry or stressed I make dubstep / glitch, and so on.
If I can give you any advice on starting a Chiptune career, I would say start off by mimicing your favorite artists. Not to the point where you no longer have your own style, but try to learn from their music, and grow from it. If they have released any of their LSDJ/ Nanoloop/ Whatever savs, download them and pick them apart to learn how they write music from the inside out, that's how I gained a lot of my skill, and you can really learn a lot about how YOU write music and what direction you want go in this way.
By default I'm a lazy musician.
Most days inspiration doesn't just descend from the heavens; I have to work hard to get it and once I have it I have to use it quickly or it fades.
It's funny, believe it or not, often inspiration comes from looking at pictures of shows I've played, or pictures of other artists performing.
It stirs up that nervous/excited feeling in my stomach which makes me think "you should probably put the extra effort in so that you can keep playing shows". So maybe it's actually adrenaline that helps me write.
I've also found the op-1 synth to be very inspirational for coming up with little melodies and playing along with things I already have.
As far as emotion goes, often i'll have little scraps of melodies that I'll start to assemble and from there thoughts, images, emotions start coming to mind from that. And then i'll develop those melodies in accordance to those thoughts, feelings, etc.
Hope that helps somehow.
1. drugs and alcohol (loads)
2. I barely remember anything when I wake up
1. drugs and alcohol (loads)
2. I barely remember anything when I wake up
Chip lyfe.
Feelings sometimes push me to work, but they're just as likely to make me give up on something that's perfectly fine or lie on my bed staring at the ceiling. I think their importance to art is overstated and their relationship to it is complicated. The vast majority of my writing gets done in an emotionally neutral state, although emotional responses can sometimes (though not reliably) tell me that something works or doesn't work.
I tend to start with ryhthm and bass and build around that. Sometimes I'll have a melody pop in my head. I sing funny made up songs to my dog and use those. My inspiration comes from just throwing random code into lsdj from time to time.
Feelings play a huge role in my style. A lot of times, my song are the inverse of my actual feeling. I write happy songs, but they have a darker or morbid message. An earlier song of mine (Push Off the Ground) is super happy, but was derived from a pure state of apathy. I felt like no one cares about me or what I had to say, so the only option when I was my lowest point was to push myself past it.
Hope that helps in some way.
Also, being inebriated seems to work wonders, as previously mentioned.
I really like these deep stories you guys have, keep em coming!
Well, nowadays all of the stuff I write is inspired by events in my life and this special person that I know. I come up with a concept first and then the title and then I try to make something that fits the mood of that concept. For example, the last concept song that I worked on is called "Krafptrov" (it translates to "effort" in English). The bassline is kind of uplifting because effort is very often an enjoyable thing but then the pad and melody were a bit more dramatic and moody because these sorts of feelings can also be a part of that.
Edit: Also, caffeine. Usually in the form of energy drinks.
Last edited by qb (Sep 4, 2014 8:44 pm)
1. drugs and alcohol (loads)
^ He might be joking, but I'm much more creative and expressive when I'm working with an altered headspace. (excluding alcohol)
2. Sometimes yes, most of the time no. I pick a vibe I'm going for before I start writing, and work/add on to songs over a longer period of time. I give my self a lot of time to go back over songs and perfect them to my taste.
deleted
Last edited by godinpants (May 14, 2020 10:38 pm)
At the moment I just experiment and let my subconscious do all the work. I wrote a concept album about space travel without even thinking about what my songs would be about when I made them. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that making music is a great way to know what you're really feeling deep down.
1. toilet, shower, driving, in bed when i'm just about to sleep. just gotta make sure i write that shit down ASAP and/or repeat it in my head/out loud for long enough that it's committed to memory. right now i've got a whole bunch of full songs just floating in my head until i have time to record them all (but they've been there for at least 3 months, some of them way longer).
2. not really, i can't sit down and just make music if i feel at all like shit.
1. I get inspiration from my favorite music and artists, inspirational stuff I find online or wherever. Personal life experiences can influence me as well. Sometimes I let my imagination run wild, and sometimes it's all of these things I've listed.
2. Depends on my mood, though my mind usually has to be cleared and focused in order to write any /good/ material. So yeah, it can help, but sometimes in can hinder.