When composing music, how to be influenced by a soundtrack (of films, video games…) without copying?
Deliberately copy snippets of a work you’re interested in as a study – e.g. transcribe it – and experiment with elements you find interesting (rhythm, chords, synths, effects, whatever) in small test pieces to make sure you understand what’s going on. Let the ideas stew for a while and then much later try to use the techniques you learned in a real piece.
That’s what I do anyway.
Clearly mark these as Do Not Use or something!
When getting into digital painting I copied some of my fav artists works from Insta and stuff and I now have a lot of pics where I don’t remember if they’re mine or not 🤦♀️
Definitely! I usually name my files starting with YYYY_MM_DD (which makes it easy to sort by the date I started making the file), a number for which entry it was on that day (1,2,3,4… plus sometimes a letter too if I want to keep multiple drafts), and a few words if I have other details I want to remember. e.g. “transcribe_song__artist” or things like “cont_YYYY_MM_DD-entry” when I continue working on a piece from a long time I ago. Sometimes I add a title after that too if I wanted to give the piece one.
Breakdown your favorite songs by chord on a keyboard until the relationship between chords and moods clicks, then you can recreate feelings rather than duplicate the mere sounds
I think that’s a very difficult question to answer. But if you want to be as close to foolproof as you can, consider researching prior cases, such as that of Vanilla Ice and Ed Sheeran.
" An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. "
Andrei Tarkovsky
Listen to it a shit ton and then when you go to make/mix dont listen to it, and let the memory of the thing in your brain speak to you. Thats how I do it anyway. Since human memory is full of holes I usually get something different but similar.
