I guess the one thing I do with biab/rb to keep the juices going is I experiment. I'll try all sorts of different styles with a piece I might be working on, or I'll plug in different chords -- often just for the heck of it -- just to see how they sound. I usually have a guitar close by to double check whether it's even an idea worth considering. But in some of the styles I mess around with (jazz mostly), the style will be playing all sorts of altered chords based on what I inputted and they may end up sounding completely differently. So it often pays just to play around with stuff.

The piece I'm working on right now, that's how I arrived at probably close to half of the chord progression I have laid down right now -- just experimentation. If I like the sound of it, I'll stick with it until maybe something better comes along.

Oh, also something else I do religiously -- it's not so much about keeping creativity flowing as it is about preserving continuity, which can be just as important -- especially if my creative flow has led me into a dead end. Every time I make a change to a piece of music I'm working on, I save the changed tune to a new file name. It doesn't have to be totally new. Often I'll just add a digit to the end, like a 1 or 2 or a or b. Just enough where I know this is a change to the one before it. This often results in a long string of versions of the same piece of music, but what its done is catalog all the changes I made to it. And if for some reason I decide I don't like something I've done, I can always go back to that earlier version. Having lost a piece of music that one's working on does major damage to one's creative flow, and I'm speaking from experience here.

Something else I like to do with biab especially is, if I've gotten to the point where I've actually put together a working progression, I'll choose a style I like, and just let it run. I find that the repetition helps me, the way my brain is wired. I'll often get ideas later on, even after I've shut down the music, which often lead to something that later gets added into it.

Last edited by cooltouch; 03/10/17 01:00 PM.
Best,
Michael

My Music:
https://soundcloud.com/michaelmcbroom/albums