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Whoever composed Dragontrainer Trist's theme...

Niyumi·4/16/2016, 6:00:46 AM·4 votes·1,595 views

You're amazing. :P Seriously, there aren't many songs / composers where I can lose myself in the music like that -- and it actually makes me tear up when a song can do that for me. So, kudos to you. ^^

Ever since I was little (after having played Nintendo games), I always wanted to compose music -- specifically more orchestral stuff that really had personality and life to it, rather than the lifeless rigidity of classical. So, to that end, I've learned how to play an instrument of nearly every family (Guitar, viloin, piano, flute, ocarina and working on clarinet and trumpet, maybe some kind of percussion), and my brother owns FL Studio which I can try my hand at composing with.

So, I have a question for you: How do you come up with the whole thing? I sit down at FL Studio and just stare at a blank screen. I have a hard time coming up with anything, whether it's more traditional art, composition, writing, anything. How do you get past the "writer's" block?

5 Comments

RiotScherzo4/18/2016, 7:40:44 PM5 votes

Thanks for the compliments! Funny that you should ask about writer's block, because it's something I initially struggled with a lot while working on this login.

I don't think there are any universal solutions to overcoming writer's block, but here are some approaches that I've found helpful, both on this piece and others:

As EverythingllbeOK said, silence your inner critic and just try to get a bunch of small musical ideas onto the page. They don't need to be great; in fact I think it's better if you accept that they don't all even need to be good. You can sort the good from the bad later. There is nothing more paralyzing than trying to come up with the Best Theme Ever when all you're looking at is a blank page. If you focus on coming up with a bunch of small ideas, eventually you should land on one that has some potential for expansion. It may be a diamond in the rough that becomes the core of your piece as you refine it, or it might just be a building block that helps you figure out what that core is, as you expand it. Or it could be neither, in which case you can move on to another idea. On Dragon Trainer Tristana, there were were probably 10 to 15 ideas of various lengths that I came up with that didn't make it into the final piece. Most of them I rightfully abandoned because they just weren't very good, but some of them were decent ideas that just didn't fit with my final vision for the piece. Which brings me to #2.
See if there's something you scrapped from an earlier project that has some potential for your new project. Sometimes what made a theme not work for a previous project is exactly what makes it work for your current one. For me this tends to work out infrequently at best, but it can be worth a shot.
Adjust your scope. If you give yourself too many options for what you're trying to accomplish, it can be overwhelming when you're starting a piece. Setting some creative boundaries is almost always helpful, even if the boundaries are somewhat arbitrary. For me, this also applies to when I'm struggling to finish a piece - often it's because I'm trying to do too much with it and incorporate too many incompatible musical ideas.

TauntyArmordillo4/16/2016, 6:08:16 AM1 votes

So, I have a question for you: How do you come up with the whole thing? I sit down at FL Studio and just stare at a blank screen. I have a hard time coming up with anything, whether it's more traditional art, composition, writing, anything. How do you get past the "writer's" block?

Split yourself in two so you'll always have a critic separate from the craftsmen.