How do you approach making music?
Do you plan everything out beforehand, or do you leave room for happy accidents while recording and producing?

Me? I love to just fire up the mic and see what happens. I might have a few basic guidelines, but I'm entirely open to "collaborating with the universe".

For example, my second song was just me playing a slow riff on the bass with the Overdrive pedal at full strength and accepting whatever weird unpredictable sounds resulted. As well, I stuck an entirely improvised spoken-word piece on top to finish it off.

It's an incredibly freeing approach; I don't have to worry about the song not sounding like it did in my head, because there was no expectation there to begin with.

I try to practice Radical Acceptance when making music (and in life in general) and have discovered so many interesting things that way.

Anyone else?

I subscribe to the Fuzzy School of Music! I never hear a song in my head before I start it... I usually just start making sounds that I like and then I record them and try to put some order in the chaos.

Sometimes when I record nonsensical words trying to come up with a vocal melody, I'll catch a mistake that I would otherwise forget about and in some cases I've written them into the melody. Maybe a flat fifth or something and I'll really like the slight dissonance between it and the root note. Music is full of flaws, it's a human experience (sometimes, nowadays)

Depends a bit, but often I just press rec and play something and see what happens. And keep adding, removing and reorganising stuff from the sonic stew until it resembles music and if I’m lucky it maybe even passes as song 😅. That is always the most fun and satisfying creative process for me.

Always

I wake up with a vision of a full band song and write it down. No research, no inspirational boards or word fields. Once I start, the remaining 20% come together. Additional melodies, missing rhyme or whatever.

I'm very much a "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" kinda person. If I'm working on something ambient I'll just tool around with a few pads until something starts to take shape. If I'm doing something chillhop I'll usually start with a beat then work my way up from there.

This year I collected loads of song prompts beforehand, had clear idea of the kind of songs I wanted to write and... yep, not used any so far and gone off an a completely different tangent 😂

Here, a very pramgatic thought: Keep the random element strong because it's one part that artificial intelligence doesn't do better than us so far.

The existing models lack an evaluation function. Meaning that when the model is confronted with an unknown sound or musical combination, it is unable to determine whether listeners will perceive it as pleasant, intriguing, fascinating, or annoying crap. As a consequence, they cannot explore and create new sounds.

As merely a lyricist, I cannot comment on the exact process of creation of new music, of course, however, I think the basic creative process is very similar - if you write a song, if you write a set of lyrics or if you paint a picture.. As far as my humble self is concerned, sometimes little fragments of a chorus or just an intriguing rhyme combination enters my mind and I build the rest of the lyrics around it... The ideas usually came spontaneously and it happens not that rarely that the lyrics take me far away in another direction than I intended originally. Anyway, it is probably not applicable for all, but one of the observations I made is that when I write a set of lyrics just based on a vague idea, without too many constraints for it that I made for myself, I am usually way more content with the results...

I love happy accidents during recording. Choosing the wrong piano sample, fine. Skipping through the soundbanks during a skirmish to find something vaguely suitable, go for it, it's what makes the track special (the main riff on Little Highs is an organ mixed with a sawtooth that I didn't even know I had). Background noise on a vocal take, triple fine. This year I've already had the washing machine, neighbour's building work and (new for 2023!) the cat purring in deep reverb. One of my favourite ever recordings of my songs is a piano/vocal demo that has a police siren dopplering by at exactly the right moment. Oh, and reaching for the wrong chord and finding a *brilliant* cluster instead of a clash? That's gold!

You can't plan for any of those things. Let them happen. You can always redo if they're intrusive or bad.

I write everyday so it varies if i don't get inspiration, then i force it. So sometimes i hear something or have a plan, sometimes I'm in front of a blank page or a microphone or just noodle on an instrument. I do a lot of research as well to create the environment for inspiration, like reading poetry, looking up qoutes, similies, metaphors, rhyming styles then musically , look through progressions, listen to interesting music etc

I love this, I don’t do a whole lot of planning and sometimes really fun. Inspiration happens while recording yes. I love collaborating with the universe.

Happy accident FTW. About 40% (generous estimate) of my songs are planned out or are collaborations with other songwriters; the rest just happen, or are collaborations with piece of software that suggest themes or phrases to me.

Plans? Me? Mistakes are where the fun starts. Most of my compositional approach consists of noodling away and listening to what's happening. I'll often accidentally play something that sounded much better that what I'd intended to play, so I follow it to see where it leads. Or I'll get frustrated by my inability to play a riff correctly, so I'll deliberately play something completely random instead to shake up muscle memory, and discover that it fitted much better into the track than the thing I was trying to play.

Improvisation rocks when it works! And FAWM improvising is usually recorded, so if it works particularly well, you can make it into a plan for future performances.

All my stuff is solo acoustic so that is certainly a factor here, but I personally like to be able to play the song two or three times before I record. That doesn’t mean it stays in that form - usually the melody changes a little, I have to reword something, and the arrangement (harmonies, extra guitar) kind of comes up as I go.

I typically think my songs are terrible when I start them. I don't start getting excited about them until I add the drums, which sometimes I'll record 15 times until I find what sounds right in my head, and they're always recorded last, so I don't feel like my songs are "good" until the very end 🤷

@headfirstonly Are we actually the same person, just separated by a body of water...? That pretty much exactly describes my approach! 😁
The closest I ever get to planning something is that I might have an idea of what sort of tempo I'd like to try next, but often even that doesn't survive more than about 2 minutes into trying stuff out...

A very magical moment occured in the story of how this song evolved. See liner notes.
https://write.fawm.org/songs/14344

I approach recording music like how doctors approach a patient with leprosy. I can write and practice the songs just fine, but once the record button is pressed it's time to suck.

I have the Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies app on my phone. I think I’ll use it!

One thing related to this that’s gotten great results is singing the melody/lyrics with a bad/not ideal headphone mix has made me come up more interesting melodies or harmonies on the first draft, sort of “accidentally.” If the chords/instruments I recorded were clearer in the headphones, , I wouldn’t have heard some of the melody or harmony notes I sang or changed to.