Ways Inspiration Strikes

[Melody303]

I want to share a particular technique with you.
Every so often, around once a year or so, I decide I need to organize a new sounds folder, either because the last one is just too large to be useful, or because my palette of sounds just needs freshening up, or because I got a new refill or Rack Extension, or haven't checked out the factory sound bank in ages, and it has some new content since the last time...
I go through all the sounds I care to go through, starting from the previous folder, and as usual when auditioning sounds, I play with each one with the aim of doing just that. Inevitably, along the way my auditioning goes off on an lovely improvisation with a particular sound, so I record that improvisation, and then I need to add some beats to it, and then you know what would be good with that? and so on. The original goal is lost along the way, since now I'm busy writing a song.
Many of my songs are born this way. (5 new ones over the last few days since I started trying to organize a new folder, and I'm still not done).

It's mildly frustrating, in a first world problems kind of way. May those be our problems in life.
Hopefully this is useful or at least interesting. Cheers.

[motuscott]

Nowadays I just dive into Reason and go where that takes me. Into a lot of head scratching usually. That’s OK, head feels kinda itchy

[rgdaniel]

A new RE or Refill will usually prompt a "demo" loop, just to suss it out. I spend just long enough on it to get 8 bars of something a bit developed, but not a song by any means. Then I do the same for another one, and so on. Eventually, one of these will "take off" in a useful way, as Melody describes. My version of "you know what would sound good with this?" is surprisingly often to just go back to a previous little demo loop and see how that fits or transitions with the current one. Surprisingly often, it works with just a little tweaking...