Do you create a track with a careful plan or do you just make music through improv and experiments?

[Jace-BeOS]

Historically, I play with sounds until my brain says "do this with it" and I obey. That has stopped working for the most part, because my brain is apparently no longer impressed with sounds themselves.

The best music I've done was made by forcing myself to work on things in a loosely structured way. Improvisation. Forcing myself to randomly pick sound-making things, pick a preset that isn't awful, and use it rapidly, before i have a chance to stop myself. I'm especially effective with actual physical instruments like wooden flute, electric guitar, and a mandolin, which is weird, since I'm not remotely an instrumentalist.

I seem to love the gadgets and software but am more immediate with the real stuff (which gets processed via plugins and sometimes hardware effects units), and immediacy is what I need most before I can shut myself down. The mistake I continue to make is in improvising on preset exploration and not recording anything.

The essential task for me is exerting self discipline: forcing myself to use my equipment at all (learning tools and playing with their sounds, instead of sitting around wasting my life away doing nothing but thinking about gadgets and watching TV or doing useless Internet stuff on forums ). But I'm better off if I actually just hit "record" and lay things down on improvisation, and then build on what I've just recorded without THINKING about it. I rarely have a detailed structured intent because I am not comfortable enough with music theory or my equipment to plan things and get what I've planned.

I have a self-censorship problem and a lack of freedom for the "impulse to create". Though it's certainly easy to not censor my posting of rambling nonsense on the Internet... I'm quite comfortable massaging existing material I've already made, so it's important to fool myself into having more pre-existing material... by creating it.

[Jace-BeOS]

Both, with the emphasis on improvisation as the underpinning source of the material. For example, for a lot of material, Ive started the process by improvising with a particular combination of sound sources for several hours until Ive built up a set of 'patterns'. (That choice of gear might have come from several days/weeks/etc of experimenting with various things until something resonates an idea, btw).
Then when I get to the point where I'm happy with them, I'll leave things for a few days, often modify the setup of the gear used, and then record another improvised set of 20-30 minutes worth of audio, derived from trying to recreate new versions/variations of those patterns, which ultimately serves as the source material.
Once Ive got my source material, the next stage for this would usually be going through the improvised recording and cutting out sections to be used as part of the final composition. Separately I'll often also create some sort of score (I think of them as maps) to work from.
The final stage would be layering/compositing/processing the sections of source material (according to the score, or further experimentation).

This is exactly how I WANT to work. It seems ideal, whenever I hear people describe this process. It accommodates my impulse to fiddle with things for fun and then results in pre made pieces from which to assemble final product (assembly being easier for me than planning and building from scratch).

I just wish I had a musical partner to exchange material with. No one local, and i don't trust the Internet to find someone I can trust with my stuff. Better yet, a studio engineer with compatible musical taste. Most of my time is spent trying to configure my tools. I've these routing devices that make it possible to route one device to another as desired, but they're hard as hell for me to operate (they're not designed visually). I just recently started recording noises from a partially temporary setup, with the plan to make a different setup and record more noises. But I'd rather have a music tech person manage my gear (especially computers) with their greater expertise and record me playing around with it

I'm a computer tech person, but I hate tech nonsense to death, and audio gear configuration is not my area of specialty. "Just use it and you'll get better at it"... I know.

[lobanov]

Cool thread, thank you guys!

I always start from something that seems intresting, beautiful, cool to me. May be it's a sound (synth patch, sampler instrument etc.) or a pattern (drum pattern, sequence of chords etc.). Sometimes a melody (or an sequence of chords or something else) grows from a particular sound. Then I search for the other parts, sort out sounds or create the new ones, invent the other melodies. I always try to reach the point when I don't want to change anything. The overall structure hence is builded on an initial element. This initial element and the nearest environment of it determine the overall structure (by contrast too) though it may be not so obvious when my work advances.

[fese]

I usually have the song ready and prepared regarding harmonies, melodies and overall structure. I don't start recording unless I have all that as a rough guideline. Often I already have an idea where the song should go style- and arrangement wise, but that can change. Sometimes I record a very rough demo track with a lot of copy and paste just to get a feeling for the structure and if it works.

The arrangement is a mixture of improvisation, following some rules, try and error and the slight hope that I can transform the ideas I have in my head with my limited instrumental skills. Can take some time and several thrown away ideas.

Sometimes just for fun I start with a blank page, eh, project and start jamming around either with guitar, synths or some drum programming. That usually leads to unfinished fragments I might like but rarely a complete song.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

i rarely have music just pop into my head, and never sit down at the daw with a plan. however, these days, most of my noodling (which used to result in some nice ideas), just bores me and when i do try to write in my head, it always seems to be way in advance of the skills i have

the solution, therefore, is to improve my chops to the extent that i can realise these ideas

[trimph1]

Both here, but mostly off the cuff

[SODDI]

Sometimes I draw my ideas first.