INSPIR Paper
Creative Inspiration For Music Makers
INSPIR is a tool to help you overcome creative blocks and get inspiration. Generate musically relevant suggestions to try in your production and get ideas when you get stuck.
FREE
- Requires software that can read .pdf files
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How INSPIR Works
INSPIR is a tool to help you overcome creative blocks and get inspiration while producing music. INSPIR Paper brings the INSPIR idea to a simple paper (or PDF) format so anyone can use it.
INSPIR works by generating random, musically relevant suggestions for you to apply in your productions. There are 4 categories of suggestions to choose from, depending on where you are in the production process; Writing, Arranging, Sound Design or Mixing.
Each category has a number of suggestions, for example in Writing there are 48. Using a random number generator, such as the one built into Google, you can generate a random number within the range of suggestions.
Next, find the corresponding suggestion on the chart and apply that to your production. For example, let’s say you get a result of 20 and you’re in the Writing Category. Go to the Writing page and find suggestion #20 which is “POLYRHYTHMS : Use polyrhythmic elements“. Therefore, you attempt to use some kind of polyrhythmic element in your music.
What I find is that simply by suggesting something you may not have otherwise thought of INSPIR jogs your creativity and gets you unstuck. I use it all the time in my own music production and it helps me immensely whenever I hit a creative block. I hope it helps you too! 🙌🏻
INSPIR Paper vs INSPIR
INSPIR began life as a MaxForLive device for Ableton Live however I’ve always wanted to make INSPIR a completely open platform for anyone to use. INSPIR Paper is a step in that direction; a simple paper (or digital paper) version of INSPIR that anyone can use no matter what software (or hardware) you are using.
That being said, if you’ve got Ableton Live with MaxForLive, the full version of INSPIR works directly in your Ableton session, which makes it really quick and easy to get inspirations as you create. If you’ve enjoyed INSPIR Paper then definitely give the MaxForLive version a go!
