🧠 inspiration isn't how you start

Hey music maker!

When I first got serious about making music, I studied hip hop producers like Pharrell, Timbaland, and Just Blaze.

One habit showed up in how all of them worked.

They were crate-diggers, similar to great DJs.

They spent dedicated time collecting records and studying albums. And this habit helped them build both a physical and mental library of breaks, sounds, melodic lines, and chord movements organized by feel and mood.

When it was time to sit and create, they had a wealth of ideas to pull from.

Songwriters do the same thing, just with different raw material.

They collect titles, lyric concepts, chord movements, and rhyme schemes. These ideas are often stored in notebooks, voice memos, and index cards.

The writers who seem to never go blank usually have better storage habits. Even if it only makes sense to them.

With that insight, I began to reframe my moments of going into writer’s block from a creativity or talent deficiency to a matter of not having enough raw material to pull from yet.

And that's a solvable problem.

I've been putting this into practice lately.

My version has two parts.

The first is grooves. When I listen to music, I'm being more intentional about identifying the rhythms I'm hearing. I'll tap rhythms out on my knee or mumble rhythmic ideas over a click track — this is helping me remember more of them, and now I'm working on saving the ones that feel good.

The second is progressions.

Songs I've analyzed, extracted the chords from, and saved in my Harmony Vault. I've marked several as favorites so I can access them quickly when I need a harmonic idea.

When I sit down now, I start with grooves that excite me. Pull up progressions that I know I like and experiment. This helps me move faster to get to the good stuff.

So instead of waiting for inspiration, I'm moving toward it.

Psychologists who study creativity break the process into four stages: prepare, incubate, get inspired, and then verify.

Musicians who struggle with writer's block often jump straight to stage three, inspiration, without doing stage one first.

Stage one is preparation. Building the library is a great way to go about it.

These iconic producers knew this intuitively, and now you have the sauce.

Key: Bb Minor

Progression: i - V/i - VI - III

Chords: Bbm - F - Gb - Db

How I'm using this for inspiration:

I've been experimenting with this progression on guitar using two completely different grooves.

The first is a bouncy, open strum pattern — something in the spirit of "Hey Ya" by Andre 3000. I extracted that groove while working on a video about easy ways to make the I-IV-V progression sound new and more exciting. (Watch it on YouTube)

The second is a smooth fingerpicking approach inspired by Ed Sheeran's guitar performance on "Love Yourself" by Justin Bieber. Slower. More chill.

So I borrowed the progression from an Ariana Grande song and remixed it with grooves from Andre 3000 and Justin Bieber songs.

That's borrowing and combining in action. And it all starts with having progressions and rhythmic patterns in your library before the writing session begins.

This includes grooves, progressions, melodic lines, titles, and concepts.

For some, depth is better than quantity. The better you know an idea, the more likely you are to use it well. For others, more ideas to mix and match is the move.

Try what I did with the Ariana Grande progression.

Play Bbm - F - Gb - Db slowly to get familiar with it.

Now try it with two different grooves.

Think about songs you know and borrow rhythmic patterns from them. Those rhythms can come from guitar, piano, bass, drums, vocals — anything.

Notice how different the same four chords can feel.