This is a podcast where we dive into the world of creativity and inspiration.
Posted by ThinkTimm. We're broadcasting from planet Earth. Now, without further ado, let's embark on a journey to think, to talk, and to explore Why Make Music.
Welcome to Why Make Music. The podcast where I talk to you about the creative process.
This is episode four of Why Make Music. I am your host, ThinkTimm.
ThinkTimm is the name I go by. It is my name. It is what I do. It is what I am. I am a Think Tim. Enough of the madness.
So let's begin. Welcome, welcome, welcome to everybody. This is episode four of Why Make Music.
We are in our fourth episode here of our podcast, and we are talking about cultivating creative ideas.
Let me tell you a little bit about myself first before we begin and get into our topic for the day.
I am a independent, no affiliation to anything major or anything important in the music industry.
I am a self-distributed musician, producer. I have my music distributed to social media and streaming platforms via United Masters,
a pay service that allows you to upload your material and they will distribute it to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Tidal, TikTok, Instagram.
I am learning to traverse my way through the social media gambit.
And I am coming to you live on this Friday, Friday the 13th, 2024 of the lovely month of September.
Today in our show, we are going to be talking about the cultivation of creative ideas.
Where do your ideas come from, whether it be music, writing, lyrics, art?
I like to think of why make music as the perfect statement, the perfect question.
And I guess technically it is the answer. Why make music?
So as I begin each episode, we take a look back down the memory of how I've gotten to this point.
Each week I like to share a little story.
This week I am going to go into a story that's kind of cool.
And I don't know if people do this nowadays because I am no longer young.
I have many years behind me and I think I have fewer years ahead of me than I do behind me.
So when I was a young teenage kid out there, I got into trouble.
I do the things I did the things that normal kids do.
But at the same point, I was pointed in the direction to be creative and to express myself.
I had a friend who was a little older than me and he was using his creative writing to necessarily chit chat and meet girls and whatnot.
So he got me interested in writing poetry.
And along with the musical background I was developing on my own, I basically naturally changed the poetry into lyrics.
And it became part of the creative process of self-expression.
When you are younger, you really don't necessarily know what to write because you don't have any life experience.
And you write about things you see, things you dream, things you want to do, things you want to be perceived as.
It's part of your alter ego, I guess, as a child or as a teenager or as a young person trying to find out what they are, who they are, and why they are.
So it's funny because back then, I would write songs and write lyrics that were basically very close to home because you didn't know anybody, you didn't have any, like I said, experience.
But I'm going to turn through some pages. I will flip the pages for you, but it might mess up the sound. But bear with me here, please.
Let me get my poetic voice on for you.
So please say I'm satisfied.
I stop only a short distance away from you. I can taste your perfume.
You don't sense me watching, nor can you hear me speak.
So softly, no one but I can hear my voice from the highest hair upon your head to the very feet that allow you to stand.
I have memorized it all. Your skin, I would love to caress.
Your eyes, please allow me to stare into. Your kiss, your sweet lips, your sweet kiss.
Only within this mind, I watch you work. I see you play.
Your voice is a song to sing.
I would love to sing and enjoy, to compose a music that would be nice too.
When we would be able to come together to open my emotions without fear.
Until that moment, I tell myself not to speak, but yet please say I'm satisfied.
Now with that being said, that was an amateurish type creative poem. That, those lyrics could be turned into a song, turned into a singing song, it could be turned into a rap song, it could be turned into anything.
The point that I'm making right there with that is that everyone can be creative and everything that you do can be a part of your journey and your experience to be creative.
So the question I'm bringing today, which I keep encouraging people to interact and leave comments, go onto my social media, thinktim.com or at thinktim on Instagram, Twitter, leave a message, leave a comment, go to why I make music on Instagram, leave a comment.
I will get back, I will respond. But the thing is, I'm actually asking the creative process, what does it bring? Music, how does your creative process start?
In the background, we have a few light arrangements, some drum tracks playing. A lot of times when I'm beginning to put together an idea or thought when it comes to music, I sit down and the first thing I do, I might program the drums a bit.
I told you before, the software that I'm using is either Logic Pro or FL Studios 24, new updates on both of those guys.
A lot of times it might be the piano, might be the keys, it might be the bass line, might be the guitar line. Fortunately enough, I am able to, with my amateur status, I do mess around with the software programs, but I also do still play bass guitar and regular guitar sometimes just to get the idea of where I'm going.
And then I translate that over into the digital instruments, the workstations and whatnot, just for clearer sounds and more opportunities to manipulate and change and widen the sound.
So, when you're putting down drums, most people really try to stick to the standard of what sounds good, what's going on, and it's a rhythmic, natural progression of layering what sounds cool, what sounds nice.
Like I said, I'm not a professional. I've never taken a music class. I am talking to you from just basic life experience.
And I said before that through all the podcasts that I do from here until the end, the goal is to eventually get to a point where I can actually maybe translate this into video and share the screen and show you the whole entire process of composing and putting ideas down and working your way towards a finished polish.
Product being though that this is episode four.
The last episode, we dove into the talk of how many people were putting out music and the realistic expectations of independent artists and how hard it is to basically market yourself and get the notoriety that you think that you might deserve or you might want or to reach the level of
the goals that you're trying to achieve.
This one is not going to be very much so statistically fact based as the last podcast, but which I do highly recommend that you go back and you check them out because you will see that there is a slow, steady progression that I am working towards of telling a larger story of what I'm doing.
And truthfully, I do believe that a lot of independent musicians, artists, we go through this and we may not necessarily have someone to discuss or bounce ideas off of because sometimes you feel as though the ideas that you have are ideas that only solely you have and things that you're experiencing.
The things that you're going through are only just based upon you and that by no means is the case.
I think everyone who decides to share and integrate themselves into other people's lives, you have to at one point or another taken to some point of consideration for what you're doing.
So, like I said, lyrics. So what do you say? What do you write about? What do you think about? I saw an interview the other day and they were speaking with a entertainer that's been in the music industry for a long period of time.
And he said something that I thought was very interesting. He said, because of his age and because he's been around for so long, he finds that now that he's older, he's reading more and he's reading more books to kind of, I guess, expand his storytelling capability.
As creative folks, we tend to experiment, but all of our experiments are basically based upon our life experiences.
So therefore, sometimes you have to kind of interject outside influences into your scenario, which might just be your mind because you're not expected to travel the world.
But you do understand that the things that you speak about and the things that you write about should be worldly enough that it will draw people in and either you can draw people into your personal experience, which can be very limited, but at the same point, if you are a
hyper piece of certain things, certain aspects of storytelling and the storytelling that you're doing is so encapsulating and so engrossing that it does play.
If you were to write a song and the song basically wasn't realistic enough that people could
relate to it, there would be no reason that people will tune in to listen to it unless
it's somewhat of a parody and it's meant to be that way.
I am never going to judge anybody's material and I'm never going to criticize or call
anyone out for anything because like I said, hats off, I salute anyone who is putting music
out, who's expressing themselves visually, musically, any type of way.
It's what we're here for, it's what we live for.
But the thing is that you do realize the musical artists, the creative writers, those who tell
a larger story, a more engrossing story, the more detail-oriented story are the ones that
tend to get the recognition.
And it's funny because I think music is something that is so personal.
It's actually, in my opinion, I think more personal than say even some of the better
movies that we watch because by no means do we ever judge a writer of any material in
a book unless it's a self-help book or something to be non-fiction.
You never hold the person to that.
The reason why I say that is because I told you that the era that we're living in right
now is 2024 and everyone's aware of how the music industry is and we're aware of what's
streaming and what's broadcast and what we listen to in our streaming situation.
But the thing is that you've got to realize the more you can relate to the person, the
more you want to bring that person into your world.
You want to kind of not necessarily possess, but you feel as though I have something in
common with them.
There were some great hip hop artists that when they write, they tell very detailed,
lyrical stories and they speak about their life prior to doing music and sometimes if
it involved illegal activities, whatever the situation may be, which is popular in storytelling.
But the thing is that the stories were so detailed that law enforcement used the stories
to try to entrap the musical artists as though they were not storytellers.
And I'm not saying that all they are are storytellers, but I don't ever see or I don't
ever recall someone going up to a writer of a murder mystery book or a horror book and
sticking that person out and trying to figure out, oh, do they have bodies in their basements
or whatever.
So music is way more personal, I'm assuming.
And I guess it's just a simple fact that you have the average person with the technology,
the platform to basically tell a story that will get a lot of people's attention.
And I guess the financial return is great on the storytelling end of it, that basically
as you're telling these stories, people tend to get very engrossed in what you're doing
and they assume that it is the reality that you're living.
And I guess that's the great part of storytelling.
I'm assuming that as all situations, stories are also lyrics of songs are also part of
the history of a culture and the history of a people.
So therefore, when you have that going on, everything is clicking all on the right cylinders
and you tell a story, your audience is captured or they're entranced by what you're saying
and they believe what you're saying and they believe the image that you're putting forth.
I'm just trying to tell you that I do believe that takes work because you have to think
you're selling yourself as a product to the masses.
And some of the best entertainers, they have a look, they have an image, they have a lifestyle
that they have to necessarily promote.
And nowadays, in the year we're living in, you think a lot of times, I'd said this before,
that music seems as though it is a gateway to other things.
So you can be a music artist and then you could become a sponsor for a brand.
You could parlay that into a television show, a movie, books.
But at the same point, unlike actors, a lot of times, unless you break that wall and become
an actor, people are paying to see the artist that you are.
We have in our generation, our time, our lifespan.
And if I sit back and say, if we look back at the last 40 years of music, there have
been people, 40 or 50 years of music.
So there have been certain artists that if you talk about rock music, if you talk about
pop music, you talk about R&B, rap, country, polka, all the subcategories that they have,
reggae, when I say those things in your mind, you picture a certain type of person.
You picture what the quote unquote stereotypical image of a rapper would be, of a country artist
would be.
But nowadays, you have a situation going on at hand is that music is music and what you're
creating, you might be a hip hop artist that creates a country song.
You might be a country singer that creates a song that becomes hot on the pop charts,
which always means that it's popular.
You have everyone trying to collaborate with each other, trying to reach more people, because
I do believe that we are getting to a point that we're realizing that we have more in
common than we do being saying that we're different from each other.
I think everyone has access to so much music that we can no longer sit back and say, oh,
all I listen to is fill in the blank.
So with that being said, since I was speaking about people who write books and comparing
their lyrical power of the pen to those who write songs and how they're digested and how
they're taken in, my question is, if you are a musician and you're able to prop, if you
can properly read sheet music and you can basically pick up sheet music from front to
back and you can play it as you go along and read it and you can capture all the emotions
that was meant to go along with that piece of music, how many people that read music
actually compose music?
I say that because I'm sure the number is great.
I'm not going to look it up to quote a number or a stat or whatever, but I'm sure that probably
more than likely everyone that can probably read sheet music might have a inner working
part of them that's a inner composer, more or less.
I say that only because, now flip that around the other way when we come talk about lyrics
and writing, we are all literate, at least I hope that we're all literate and able to
read, but just because you can read a book doesn't necessarily mean you can write a book.
So that being said, back to the music, just because you can listen and critique doesn't
necessarily mean that you could create.
I want to believe that everyone given the proper tools can do that.
Now, what are the proper tools?
In the school system, I'm assuming that there is still music programs.
I know for a fact that young kids today, high school age, they have music classes and they
go on to a garage band, I think it's called Band Camp or something like that, or Band
Lab, more or less Band Lab, and the teacher might show them popular songs and he shows
them on the software using the virtual instruments where to place the notes to recreate songs
that they might be familiar with.
That right there might be an entryway for a lot of people to just start doing music
or doing on their downtime because I do know that Apple computers, they come equipped with
a garage band.
The cost of buying software for your computer, a starter software program isn't over $250
and it comes with basically lifetime upgrades and it's just basically you can sit here on
the screen and not even have an instrument that you can compose and put together drum
patterns.
Excuse me.
That makes me think about something.
As a person who has been solely, as of lately, doing maybe, I guess you could say it's self-indulgent
musical projects for myself and not necessarily playing with other musicians outside of my
need or my necessity to have someone do something if I can't do it or whatever.
But the thing is that I'm going to musical events and musical shows and I love the fact
that we have software and new hardware that are so colorful and so bright with the new
MPCs and new APCs, digital hardware devices.
If you're not familiar with that, those are the digital music production devices that
are being used a lot of times and they have pads that trigger certain sounds and you can
do everything from drums to all the other voices and all the other virtual instruments
that you had to pre-program and then enter the pads and then you play them and depending
on what device you have, the pads light up and I'm like, it's cool.
I'm like, I have a device here in Akai and my pads don't light up.
I went to a concert a couple years ago and it might have been 10 years ago.
I'm like, it's a story, but the story is still relevant.
I go to the concert and I'm there with the people that I'm with and the person on stage
is a well-known music producer and the music producer is touring with the artists and the
music producer has his corner up the stage on a riser the whole day and he has his equipment
next to him, in front of him, so forth and so on.
Normally when you're at a live event you have the drummer that will break it down and give
you a drum solo and they'll isolate the drummer, let the drummer do his thing, the bass player
to take a run, the guitar player, the violinist, whomever, whatever music he goes to, whatever
music you listen to, whatever type of venue you go to, for whatever type of event you go
there for, you will have a person that will then take their solo.
So we're in an arena and they are big music monitors and this set producer takes his solo
but he turns the knob very in the groove, hand up, raise and so forth and so on, but
he just basically moves the fader, he's not even playing, he wasn't even playing the keyboard
and other like that, he just basically pressed the button and then he just pressed the button
and all I'm saying is that yo, I don't think I could necessarily, I could be hype about
my music, I don't know in that environment, turning a knob and it kind of loud, loud,
loud scream, but I'm just saying as a person who has a multitude of knobs in front of me
right now and keyboards and buttons and pads and what not and I just thought it was very,
very funny that that got a roaring cheer from the crowd as they zoomed in on him and he
basically just turned the volume up and down by pressing the button to trigger an effect
which is cool, don't get me wrong, it's very, very cool, I like to do that, I admire the
producer, I think that like I said before, anyone who is making a living and doing this
and this is all they totally do, you're right, you're completely alright with me, like I
said, I paid because of this show so I'm fully aware of the person's music and I'm fully
aware of their talent, so never any hate, I'm just like saying, but the difference is
you go to another concert for another type of music and you'll have a guitar player
or you'll have a drummer really break it down and you get the same energy level from the
crowd as though he was playing the drums, I salute it, I think it's great because I
would love to have that type of people holler and scream and cheer I guess more or less,
but I digress, so sorry about that cough, but where do you begin your process?
So like I said, I tend to want to start with the drums and normally it's just a basic
situation with the kick and the snare, you find the sounds that you like because nowadays
we have so many sounds and such at our disposal that every track that you do can encompass
a lot of different sounds, you can bring them together and you can put the things in there
like right here, this is a track that I put together and it has, this is all done I do
believe on FL Studios program and the drums and the sounds or whatever you try to make
something that's appealing that will keep the person going, you know you got to realize
that it is music and it does have an energy level, a lot of times when I'm doing music
I like to describe the music as it's music, you know I'm like you don't really want to
be too stagnant and too predictable, I'm like of course there's drum patterns and you can
program two measures, four measures, eight measures at a time, so whatever, however short
you want to make them or you can, I tend not to use samples of other songs because that's
a whole copyright publishing issue and concern because then you end up having to pay if a
rap song becomes popular and you would have to pay the person and you have to get some
credits made for it, that means that you're publishing money, your royalties are split.
Also I told you guys before I said part of my goal is to try to establish a sync licensing
situation with music libraries, you know so this is like the sync libraries are the people
who sync licensing basically, the sync libraries are basically folks who you might hear the
music in commercials, you might hear the music in backgrounds of movies and so forth and
then the thing is that what I understand is that the music supervisors who are picking
the music and who are paying out the artists I think is more so to their benefit to have
someone who is not necessarily having to take for sample clearance and if everything is
being controlled and housed by one person as opposed to basically a lot of people.
The reason why I say that is because looking at some of the credits that are on some albums
that have come out recently and I realized when I was online looking at other information
I'm not the only person that noticed this but there are a lot of albums that basically
have 16 or 17 songs on it and out of those 16, with those 16, 17 songs it might be as
many as 100 producers listed on the album. Now with that being said, I'm not saying the
albums are overproduced but I'm saying the thing is that because a lot of people are
basically using samples and not necessarily playing live or creating their own sound or
crafting their own sound which is also part of the cultivating creative ideas of episode
4, they end up having to pay credits, pay and give credit and royalty to the original
maker of the song. So that being said, I try to keep up with what's going on in the music
industry because when I'm trying to market my sound, my music, when you read and you
look at what folks are saying as far as what people like, they tell you to basically find
a sound and do a, it's called a beat type situation which is basically if you like a
set artist and you want to try to market your material towards that artist, when you list
your music on these distribution sites for producers and for artists, these beat listing
sites, they tell you to put your stuff as a type that is familiar with so this way people
will I guess shop you and find you easier because you are saying that you sound like
this person. I opted not to do that because I did not necessarily know who I felt like
but then I tried it their way. So their way was basically if you want to move a lot of
stuff, you basically define a producer that's selling and you basically do what he's doing
like you create a drum pattern the way he's creating a drum pattern, you use a type of
sample or a melody that he's using or she's using and you basically emulate what they're
doing and you hope that you can get a fraction of the success that they get because if you
like what they're doing and I'm doing the same thing that they're doing and our music
sounds similar, why would you not like mine and mine is more accessible as far as price
wise if you are an artist trying to capture that person's sound. With all that being said,
I was majorly taken back because it's one thing, as a person who plays music, you have
basically 12 functional keys on seven or eight octaves to play around with and you have all
your chords structure and you have your notes and you have certain chords, progressions
that go well together as opposed to other ones that don't go well together. So when
you are putting a song together and you are trying your best to do this and you're putting
out a track and you're putting it together and you're thinking like, okay, I'm going
to listen to what's popular and then come to find out what's popular. The person who
is doing the track is basically taking a sample from another song and either they're speeding
the sample up or they're slowing the sample down and they're taking maybe two bars of
the beat and they manipulate it and chop it up a little bit, they put it back in, they
add some effects on to it and so forth and so on and they put it out there. The bad thing
about it is that it sounds really good but you still have to pay the creative who created
that song. There is a thing going on now where you can look online and they'll be shocked
because they'll sit back and tell you that, oh, this song has the melody of another song
and out of curiosity you're sitting there thinking like, how are they doing this and
they're not necessarily paying for the song or you don't know if they're the deal done
in the background and when the song is done, how are you basically using the same cadence
or the same melody of a song? It's crazy. I think it's called inner pollination. That's
what it's called. Basically what it is is that you get an artist who's making a song
and their hook is very similar or their music or their melody is extremely similar to the
hook or melody from a song that's 20 years old, 30 years old, 5 years old, so forth and
so on and all they do is they change up the lyrics a little bit and whatever. I don't
know. I'm sure that there's some type of deal with the distribution and the marketing of
the record company that maybe perhaps it's already worked out and us as listeners we're
just saying, oh, it sounds familiar, but I think there's a lot of stuff going on where
there's only so many notes that a person can play, but when you straightjack a track and
you don't necessarily give credit to the person who wrote the track originally, I think that's
kind of a little bad because now they basically use this new thing called inner pollination.
This is when you have hooks and they are taking melodies of songs. They're taking the cadence
of choruses and hooks, verses, and they're changing the lyrics and sometimes from what
I see when I look at the credits, I look things up. Sometimes the writers are listed and credited
by the original song and sometimes they're not, but the thing is to the average person
that you're attributing the song to maybe in the free domain category of music, which
the career music, which I don't think it is because like
sometimes the song is only a couple years old or whatever or
just a couple decades old. But um, there are so many loopholes
that people get around doing it. And what I'm trying to say is
that cultivating creative ideas all start over and sometimes it
starts with another person's song and sometimes it starts with
another person's melody. And I guess technically we can't do
mad because like I said, there's only so many notes and so many
chords that you could play and things are going to sound
similar. And no one is trying to technically reinvent the
wheel. No, I'm like everyone is just trying to make things that
sound or try to make things that person and I said this before
and I think I said it in every episode and I think I will
continue saying it's the greatest compliment I think a
musician or a person can have is if your music could basically
fade into the background and not necessarily be a super super
standout to a point that doesn't sound as though it's good or if
people are over critiquing because it sounds flash. So I
guess a familiar situation ever mind you with something else that
puts you at ease. It might manifest memories or it might
make you like the song more or it might make you revisit the
original song. There was a song that was popular that was turned
on to a couple years ago and then not until I was actually in
the market and I heard another version of the song and I was
thinking like oh wow, I wonder if this artist got paid because
this person is going to that song. So then when I went to go
look that up, I found out shocking to me that the song
that I was introduced to was a cover song from the 60s to late
60s and was basically redone over and I think it was like
2020 or something like that and it sounds so cool but I was
unaware that this song existed prior to it that I was wondering
if the group that I was turned on to was actually the third or
fourth group that redid the song. The group that I heard
doing the song was actually using the original song and its
chorus so it's wild. But the thing is the guy from the 60s is
credited as a writer on all these tracks so therefore you
realize that's crazy in a way because financially you look at
it that wow he wrote this song that it was okay. I looked at the
chart position of it back in the day and it did good but it
wasn't super great but if the group that did it the second or
third group that covered the song didn't do the song just as
financially. This last group who did the song they got bank on
they collected the bank on the song so I'm sure the writer was
quite happy because if he's still alive or his family has
the state or whatever the situation may be has collected a
lot of funds based upon something that he did but it
was part of the creative process and it's cool. Music is out
there to be listened to and music is out there to be shared
but once again I am coming to the end of my time chit chatting
with you guys. This was a fun episode it wasn't a fact filled
episode like episode three. Please if you get a chance go to
Apple, Spotify, I heart wherever you get your podcast from and
look me up. Why make music hosted by ThinkTimm. I'm getting
there. Thank you for tuning in for those who listen. It's a
very good humbling situation to be able to put something out and
to talk and rap with you guys and chop it up and I enjoy it.
Please check me out on all my social platforms. ThinkTimm
WDMN, WDMNATION that's on Instagram. There's some cool
artwork on there plus there's some music stuff on there. The
website is ThinkTimm.com. You can find my music on all
streaming platforms, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Tidal, Sound
Cloud. Check me out. Like I said before, there's a Patreon
account. You can look me up. I haven't put anything on there
yet extra special because I don't have anybody to do it for
but thank you for listening. Once again, ThinkTimm… if nothing
else. Peace.