John M Davis

I gave myself option paralysis for the greater good.

It’s an ancient refrain: you don’t have to search far to find plenty of books, articles, videos, and hot takes out there about how reducing your options can make you more creative, blah blah. It’s all true, but sometimes, constraints can be… uh… constraining.

When I’m composing, I like to work with constraints. The nature of modern music making means we have a near limitless supply of weird and wonderful tools to work with. From “traditional” acoustic instruments to wild audio manglers that turn sound into endlessly malleable silly putty. The sheer bulk of available options can induce analysis paralysis and lead to a kind of creative constipation.

So I, like many of my fellow travelers, create templates that give me a starting point for projects. The stuff I need to just sit down and get going on the business of makin’ music. No unnecessary distractions which saves me a lot of time and creative energy. There’s only one problem:

I’m bored

— some five year old

I started a new project recently. I had a lot of ideas around structure and meter, tempo and keys, rhythm and… well, this is me, so probably not blues. But I didn’t have any specific notion about how this music would sound.

Back to my usual template, I started work and pffft. Nothing was exciting and nothing was gelling. I appear to have wrung everything I can out of my tried and true collection of tools. At least for now, anyway.

In the meantime, all the music software companies have been doing their “psst, hey buddy” thing like the mysterious merchant in Resident Evil 4 (how does that guy have a rocket launcher in his coat?).

The sales were insanely good and I hadn’t tapped my 2026 music budget yet so I treated myself to some shiny, new stuff-I-don’t-need-but-kind-of-want-so-who’s-going-to-stop-me. I went overboard but that’s not the point.

I brought up a blank template, loaded up some of these shiny new things and suddenly… I wasn’t bored. I didn’t get anything accomplished for like a week, but I was definitely not bored.

I mean I seriously went down a nerdy rabbit hole for days wasting time with this stuff. I forgot all about my work in progress and just scrolled through sounds like it was Wednesday night and I had no idea what to watch on Netflix. I even discovered how to route audio from a microphone into a software vocoder and spent as much silly time with that as a 12 year old recording fart sounds.

In the end however, I made a selection of new tools I would not have picked deliberately. These sounds spoke to the ideas in my head and I felt like I could get going on my new project(s). I was rejuvenated and ready to play and experiment.

I’m not going to recommend that anyone do what I did and bury themselves under an avalanche of new synthesizers. I do recommend breaking one or two of your usual constraints, maybe treating yourself to a new and different plugin or paint brush or duck call or whatever it is you use to make your art. Doing this can stop you in your tracks but if you lean into it, altering your constraints can open options you didn’t know you had.

Photo by TStudio