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When I sit down and play without overthinking it, I end up playing corny 70s dad rock riffs for some reason. I mean that music is fine but I don't want to be making it. I play other instruments, but what I'm doing is very stagnant on each of them as well. Alternate tunings aren't really doing anything for me either, though that's gotten me out of a rut in the past. playing deliberately in a new style seems inauthentic to me sometimes, like I'm doing some kind of shallow pastiche. I guess it's like some musical identity crisis. You ever feel like you forgot what your creative voice is, or like a stranger is playing through you?

In a word... yes.

Maybe you're playing too much. Every time i sit down to play i either can barely play or come up with something that at least i personally think is really cool.

Yeah maybe just give it a little time. I just felt a similar wackiness, but for better or worse life got crazy and I didn't touch an instrument in two weeks. When I finally got time a few riffs I love came piling out.

Or listen to sheer mag. That's some rock and roll that I can totally get behind!

try and put yourself as far outside your comfort zone as possible. like, common alternate tunings and different kinds of instruments are cool but they're not generally too helpful if your mind can still adjust everything back to what you've been comfortable with up til now.
a few months ago i just tuned every string on my guitar to an odd interval so that it would be impossible to do anything that i'd been doing in standard/drop/open tunings previously, i cannot overstate how much this has helped me, i now play in a tuning that makes zero sense and so am getting better at playing with my ears and not my eyes, discouraging shapes, patterns, scales, formulas etc. when you play and write, music will end up being structured regardless of how free you are to begin with, so boxing yourself in to begin with can often really limit what you can come up with.
i understand where you're coming from with the whole identity crisis thing, i've been in a similar predicament for a couple of years now, well i'm sure a lot of us here are to varying degrees.
i can't commit to anything if i feel like i'm ripping off or imitating existing music, so i stopped learning to play other musicians' songs about 2-3 years ago, and have been trying to erase as much of my theoretical knowledge as possible (i was classically trained on piano and guitar for close to 10 years and it just did not help me as far as creating was concerned, i'm glad i was able to devote myself for some time to becoming proficient but in the end it just felt like a curse).
i still have a long way to go but i think the more i deconstruct these kinds of things the closer i'll get to whatever it is i'm trying to achieve. the world is constantly getting bigger and we're all getting smaller, so it's not always easy to come up with something that feels genuine, but stick with it dude.

Suck less. Easy.

backwardsvoyager wrote:try and put yourself as far outside your comfort zone as possible. like, common alternate tunings and different kinds of instruments are cool but they're not generally too helpful if your mind can still adjust everything back to what you've been comfortable with up til now.
a few months ago i just tuned every string on my guitar to an odd interval so that it would be impossible to do anything that i'd been doing in standard/drop/open tunings previously, i cannot overstate how much this has helped me, i now play in a tuning that makes zero sense and so am getting better at playing with my ears and not my eyes, discouraging shapes, patterns, scales, formulas etc. when you play and write, music will end up being structured regardless of how free you are to begin with, so boxing yourself in to begin with can often really limit what you can come up with.
i understand where you're coming from with the whole identity crisis thing, i've been in a similar predicament for a couple of years now, well i'm sure a lot of us here are to varying degrees.
i can't commit to anything if i feel like i'm ripping off or imitating existing music, so i stopped learning to play other musicians' songs about 2-3 years ago, and have been trying to erase as much of my theoretical knowledge as possible (i was classically trained on piano and guitar for close to 10 years and it just did not help me as far as creating was concerned, i'm glad i was able to devote myself for some time to becoming proficient but in the end it just felt like a curse).
i still have a long way to go but i think the more i deconstruct these kinds of things the closer i'll get to whatever it is i'm trying to achieve. the world is constantly getting bigger and we're all getting smaller, so it's not always easy to come up with something that feels genuine, but stick with it dude.

That randomly tuning trick sounds like a fun idea. I think I'm going to take a break and then give that a shot; it worked for Nick Drake and Sonic Youth, and it sounds like it worked for you, too.

In re: being unable to commit for fear of imitation, I fully relate. When I play and write it feels like I'm making somebody else's idea of music, or more confusingly, like the somebody else in that scenario is me, but a version of me I don't recognize. Does that make any sense?

I've definitely felt like this before. The random tuning trick works really really well for me, if I play with that for a week or so I play very differently to normal by necessity and then even when I tune back to standard I feel like I've learned something and am out of the rut.

In one band I was in, to stave off this sort of feeling I tuned down to Eb standard for a couple of months just so I was always actually thinking about what I was playing, rather than doing it by rote.

When I started trying to play, my friend to me that it is okay to sound like someone else, as long as you don't sing like them. I don't know what he meant, but all the time I find myself making a riff and it sounds a certain band. Sometimes I go with it, it is a good riff, or a go up or down the chords until it gets to a better darker or brighter sound I want.

Basically, I write bad jangle pop punk and alter my chords and progression until it is a darker song. I'm basically saying find why you make dad rock, and change one or two things. That's all you need.

I thought about this thread and you know, you could start taking a lot of LSD, take a trip to India, and rip off Donovan. That really, really worked for The Beatles.

WayToHip wrote:When I started trying to play, my friend to me that it is okay to sound like someone else, as long as you don't sing like them. I don't know what he meant, but all the time I find myself making a riff and it sounds a certain band. Sometimes I go with it, it is a good riff, or a go up or down the chords until it gets to a better darker or brighter sound I want.

Basically, I write bad jangle pop punk and alter my chords and progression until it is a darker song. I'm basically saying find why you make dad rock, and change one or two things. That's all you need.

I gave this a lot of thought and I think there's a lot of wisdom in its simplicity. I've been trying to put into practice; whenever I catch myself playing something I think is cheesy, instead of abandoning it I've been tweaking it.

casecandy wrote:I thought about this thread and you know, you could start taking a lot of LSD, take a trip to India, and rip off Donovan. That really, really worked for The Beatles.

I love everything about this plan except ripping of Donovan.

friendship wrote:

casecandy wrote:I thought about this thread and you know, you could start taking a lot of LSD, take a trip to India, and rip off Donovan. That really, really worked for The Beatles.

I love everything about this plan except ripping of Donovan.

HEY

YOU COULD DO A LOT WORSE THAN DONOVAN

A LOT WORSE

True! But I'll never do Donovan as good as Donovan does Donovan.

I feel this way all the time, I don't really have a solid way out of it, usually it is related to my emotional state or other things in life. So trying to focus on solving conflicts in my life outside of music will help me sometimes. I agree with backwards about getting yourself out of patterns and boxes that you will subconsciously get into. I write better stuff when I try and go with what's in my head than what is in my fingers (habits). if you have a hard time playing what you hear in your head (which is true for me, and a lot of others) you could practice ear training. you can do this with online tools and learning songs by ear. if nothing else I practice improving my chops, which is kind of boring a lot of the time but distracting enough to be worth doing.

friendship wrote:True! But I'll never do Donovan as good as Donovan does Donovan.

True. I mean, not even The Beatles did Donovan as well as Donovan...

Fun fact! They really did kinda rip him off! He pretty much co-wrote "Julia" and "Rocky Raccoon," among other tracks. I know it's not strictly relevant to the convo, but super interesting IMO!

"And, on [The White Album], John picks the guitar because he learned off Donovan when we were in India, Donovan showed him how to fingerpick."
Paul McCartney

"Donovan is all over The White Album."
George Harrison

Anyway, how goes the playing? Making any progress?