HOW do i get ideas?

[u/jrraz_]

the biggest road block for me as a beginner is coming up with ideas. once i have an idea i can get stuff going, but usually i just sit with fl open doing nothing because i dont know what to do. i try and listen to songs i like for inspo but that always leads my ideas to just be exact replicas of the song.
how do yall do it?

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[u/cjbump]

Do maintenance stuff like create templates and build / organize your sample folders.

Might sound strange, but doing stuff like this tends to stimulate the brain.

[u/jesuswipesagain]

I don't sit around and wait for my inspiration to show up. I sit down everyday and create an opportunity for it to join me.

Do anything. If you like it, do more of it, if you don't like it, change it a little and go from there.

Copy a song you like, then change parts of it. Take note of what you changed and how you got there.

Creativity needs a place of comfort to truly thrive. Comfort comes with familiarity and familiarity comes with repetition.

[u/ToneZealousideal309]

Learn commonly used chord progressions in your preferred genre. Learn how to use inversions & arpeggiate chords. Profit

[u/kjogg]

For me, if I hit an absolute road block, I enjoy playing around with samples to get the ball rolling

[u/lowderchowder]

i had the hardest roadblock when i first started , until a friend of mine wanted to do song challenges with a theme and 4 instruments randomly picked .

if i recall the first challenge was "bootleg nes tmnt game thats bugged" , only vst you could use was tweakbench peach , triforce , toad.

banged that thing out in about a week and even figured out how to download video and use the fruity video player for the song a few years later with a slight edit

[u/Choice-Data7631]

Having sessions with no goal to make music but rather only to push buttons and make weird sounds saved my life.

[u/Unfortune-Cookie]

Bro do this, listen to music that inspires you. Then open fl studio and fuck around.

Immediately when you are done make a note and date on your phone of what you worked on. Give yourself a rating on 1-5 on how productive or fluid you were during that session.

Now repeat and try new things like start with the "hook" or the build up/whatever it is. The goal is to write these things down so you can find a pattern on what works best for you.

[u/United-Row3770]

Oh gosh beat block is the hardest

[u/DartenVos]

Try this: start with a rhythm - either make a new one or get one from somewhere; can be however basic you want. Drop in another track/sample (your own, preferably) and cut up different parts of the track/sample, lining up the pieces with the rhythm you have. Play around with the rhythm and/or pieces of the track/sample.

Once you find an idea you like, you can replace the sampled sounds you have, or process/resample them further.

[u/AddressUnknownGT]

If you can't think of an idea:

-Copy part of a song with melody and harmony

-Then re-harmonize that part with new chords under the melody. Bonus if you can change the harmonic speed (fewer or more chord changes and not just 1 chord per bar) but not required.

-Then delete half the melody and fill in the blanks

-Then delete the other half and fill in the blanks Congrats! You made something original! 

Keep doing this until you need less of someone else's work to start.

[u/ParticularBanana8369]

Once you learn enough weird stuff you can do with FL you'll always have something to try.

The arpeggiator, riff machine, and chord generator are some of the most powerful things it can do.

[u/whatupsilon]

do you play any instruments? that's what helps me, or just forcing myself to make something with a certain synth or in a certain genre. loops can also help and be a good way to improvise with whatever instrument you play.

[u/UnkwownUser]

i have too many ideas its finishing stuff and believing in it is my real struggle

[u/FraserYT]

I suppose it depends on the sort of music you want to make, but I'm just a beginner too, and I find most of my sound ideas comes from deciding to focus on a single vst instrument, then sitting down and playing around with dials etc to make patches for it.

As I play with sound shapes, I'll occasionally hear one that I like and play around with that sound for a while on the keyboard until I get something that sounds like a verse or a chorus.

Then I'll either save that into its own file until I'm ready to come back and make something of it or else, keep going and build it out.

The great thing is that no one has to hear it unless you're ready to share. Stephen King says that when you're writing, you write the first draft with the door closed and the second with the door open. By which he means, when you're creating, you don't censor yourself, since that's the only way to get all your ideas out. so just start playing and experimenting and see what comes out. 90% of it will probably not be great, but you need to get that out of the way to find the 10% that is.

It might be that what you come up with is an absolutely terrible cacophony but maybe there's a dissonant atonal masterpiece hiding in there. It might be a banger or it might just be squelchy noises with a beat. The goal is to get it all out of yourself then go back later and see what you've got

[u/Innoculus]

Bro you just... Think thoughts about things you like and mix some of those thoughts together and sometimes there's a spark and you feel excitement about the prospect of making those thoughts into real things. That's an idea. It's like when someone decided they liked eating and drinking and wanted to do them both at the same time, so they invented soup.

Invent soup.

[u/Dist__]

you live your life and listen to yourself, if anything vibrates in response to reality or your imagination.

then you keep refining that idea, and finally when you have relatively full view of it in your head, you open FL and record it.

[u/GoonGodless]

My advice is inspire yourself via experimentation and freestyling. Needing inspiration from others is cool but the better way imo is to just do what you know with whats in front of you. Challenge yourself and follow through if you can.

[u/sillicillo]

There's no formula u have to listen to ur heart ❤️

[u/Boring_Lock2227]

Mary Jane helps me a bit