Setting intentions can be one of the greatest ways to evolve your artistic process. It’s easy to get stuck in a loop and keep doing the same thing over and over again, but if you look at the history of most great artists, from Led Zeppelin to Ricardo Villalobos, they tend to follow a trajectory where they clearly start somewhere, and evolve their creative process over time: constantly changing – undergoing a slow metamorphosis, discovering new techniques, methods, and tools, creating art that evolves as they do.
A good way to set the stage for this sort of evolution is to set intentions when you create. This way, rather than simply repeating what you have done before, you are constantly evolving and pushing yourself to grow and learn new things.
To start: take a little bit of space from your own creative process. Pick one or two weeks, and deliberately stop creating! Instead of making your own music, choose an artist that you admire, and start going through their catalogue. Look on Discogs, Bandcamp, Beatport, Soundcloud, Spotify, etc. and see if you can find their entire discography. If their tracks tend to come out on vinyl and you don’t own them, look them up on YouTube so that you can listen to the entire songs. Once you have skimmed their entire catalogue, pick 1 to 3 compositions that particularly speak to you from the early phase of their creative career (the first 5 years) and study these pieces. What genre(s) could they be classified under? What types of instruments, real or electronic do they use? Read the liner notes/release details. Are there any special recording techniques that they employed? Did they record other musicians or vocalists? What BPMs and time signatures did they use? Did they do the mixing themselves? Or did they hire somebody else to do it? Who mastered the music? What label(s) put the music out? Write this all down in a notebook so that you can come back to your notes later.
Once you have done this for 1 to 3 songs from their early career, move to their mid-career. This is the period when they have been creating for more than 5 years professionally, have gained some confidence and professional credibility, and have likely become more confident in their tools and techniques. Ask the same questions when intensively listening to 1 to 3 tracks that speak to you from this period. Do you notice anything different between these pieces and their early works? Are they exploring new genres? Styles? Techniques? Instruments? Are they releasing on different labels? How has their creative process evolved?
Now, take a listen to 1 to 3 pieces from their late career – compositions created after the artist has already been composing music for 20+ years. Or, if the artist is no longer alive, the pieces that they composed during the last 5 years of their creatively active years. Ask the same questions as you listen. How has their style evolved? When you compare these works to their early and mid-career works, are there any key differences? In technique, style, genre, or anything else? How do these later works demonstrate their artistic evolution? Make note of your observations in your notebook.
Now, take a few days to let this all percolate. Do not go to the studio. Do not create anything. Simply look at your notes. If you want, listen to their music again.
When you are making note of their evolution and its technical characteristics, start to think about your own creative process. Where are you in your own creative career? Are you at the beginning? The middle? Maybe even at the end? What creative goals did you have when you first started? Are you still committed to these principles and practices? Or have your goals changed? What techniques do you really want to try that you haven’t yet? What technologies or skills do you want to acquire or learn that you are still unfamiliar with? Where do you want to be in 5 years? In 10 years? At the end of your creative career? What is your ultimate goal with your creativity? To make money? To get famous? To truly evolve a creative process and leave a lasting mark on the history of your art form? Pick one, focus on that, and write down a few notes about your goals. Make sure to mark them with a date so you can come back to them later.
Now, do the same thing with your own work. Listen to the first pieces that you ever created. Then listen to the pieces that you have created more recently. Are you happy with your progression? Where do you want to go? What’s missing?
Sometimes, taking a little bit of distance is the greatest gift that you can give yourself. To evolve. To stay focused on your own goals, to become the artist that you want to be, to accomplish the goals that you set out to achieve.