Regular routine or spontaneous… how do you compose

[GaryW]

This has probably come up before, but I am interested on how and when you compose. Do you have a regular daily routine, or do you write when the inspiration hits you? I find a daily routine works for me.

[Art Munson]

Daily routine for me. Admin in the morning, writing in the afternoon. Quite at 5:00 and I don’t write on weekends.

[Mark_Petrie]

Wow! I really admire that Art. My schedule is all over the place – resembling something like this in any given month:

week 1: do everything else before 4pm (sleep, go out, meet clients and friends)
write library music, send parts to musicians from 4pm – 10pm. Work on custom music from midnight – 4am

weeks 2 and 3: write new music and revise last week’s from 6pm – 5am. Hopefully no custom work or it’ll get nuts.

week 4: revise and stem all tracks from the month from 3pm to 5am. Hopefully no meetings, custom work or for that matter, much of any social interaction.

I’m working on making things a lot more efficient, to claw back some time from ‘busy’ work, to get more music out the door and be more social!

[MichaelL]

@Mark….when do you actually sleep!?!?!? 😀

[Dannyc]

these are probably the kind of hours you need to put in to be really successful.

but yeah i agree, you must sleep about an hour a night Mark ha ha.

[guscave]

I’m not doing this as a full time gig yet, but I’ve set up a schedule that I try to adhere to every week starting from 5pm to 11 pm:

Mondays- Do all the admin stuff (metadata, BMI, follow ups, etc)
Tuesday, Wed and Thursday- write, produce, re-write, and submit.
Friday, Sat and Sunday- Family time… might answer an email or two.

[Kubed]

A daily routine for me as well.
If i’m not in the mood to start a fresh track,i’ll revisit some of the projects sitting on my hd (around 15 atm) and try to finish one of these.
Usually,after listening to 3 or 4 of them,something clicks and i manage to work well for hours.

Usually work on music from 11:00am – 15:00pm,have a 1 hour break and then
back to work for 2 more hours.
Then a 1 hour nap,couple of fruits,meet with friends and family and back for some more work from midnight to around 02:00am.
8-9 hours combined is the regular time i spend daily to my studio.
It can go up to 10-12 if i’m working with deadlines and weekends are not excluded.

Lately i was thinking of a “No work on Sundays” rule but haven’t started it yet.
I’m a full time composer so,work hours can be flexible 🙂

[Paolo]

Hello all!

I’m curious from your responses – how/when do you schedule continuing education (tutorials, lesson videos, etc) on music production and also practicing on your instrument(s)? Is that on your composing time or outside of your dedicated composing time?

Thanks!

[daveydad]

In addition to cues housekeeping chores, I pretty much have made it a goal to compose 1-3 new tracks per week. Depends on the complexity of what they are. A cute dramedy track takes far less time than a full on orchestral piece.

[Daniel]

As I still have a “Day job”, I try my best to get 1-2 ques out a week. That’s with working 60-65 hrs a week at my outside job, spending time with 2 High School age children and getting chores done around the house such as mowing , weeding , painting, etc.

I am very grateful that I do business with some pretty good libraries and I find that working to briefs gets my motivation going.

When I have some spare time, like at 1am in the morning, I may write a Epic Orchestral or Investigative Tension que to just have on my hard drive. I can upload the ques as the libraries need them.

[Mc_GTR]

I’ve found that inspiration often needs a “trigger”. Briefs are great for that, and so is a list of keywords, or just a desire to make an album and go through finding reference tracks for the project ect. Daily routines don’t really matter for me that way, as I can always set my self up, no matter when.

[Mike Marino]

I really enjoyed Steven Pressfield’s book “The War of Art.” It actually spends some time tackling this very topic. Highly recommend it for creatives if you haven’t read it yet.

[Author]

Posts