How To Make Music Effortlessly
Discover how tapping into flow can transform your music-making process.
Hey—It’s Matthew from BeatsbyVanityTV.
Here are some tricks for effortless creativity.
Estimated read time: 1 minute, 42 seconds.
Lately, I’ve been doing an efficiency audit—figuring out how to finish more songs in less time.
Not just for productivity’s sake. Finishing more songs isn’t the goal. Finishing better ones is.
So I’ve been asking: How can I create the right environment for effortless creation?
That might sound odd. Why effortless?
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent his life studying this effortless mental state and called it flow. In flow, time fades, distractions disappear, until all that remains is a single focal point.
I’ve never entered a flow state while EQ’ing a snare. I've only entered flow when rapidly creating a song. But to create rapidly, I need to be prepared: drum kits pre-made, synth ideas sketched, melodic fragments drawn out.
The pre-work is gathering the firewood. Flow is what lights the fire.
This firewood gathering I procrastinate on. Instead, I start new tracks, keeping myself stuck in a loop where I never find flow and never finish projects.
I've observed many of the best producers I know gathering their materials in sound design sessions before they start writing. So when they sit down, they’re not searching for sounds—they’re simply arranging them into musical sequences. Mixing comes later. But the core of the song is always written in a flow state.
Here are three ways you can run sound-gathering sessions:
1. Re-sampling
Play inside your DAW—no judgment, no goals. Keep The Rolling Sampler open, capturing anything interesting as it happens. This plugin records everything coming out of your DAW in real-time, so even an “unproductive” session can yield hundreds of fresh samples.
Better yet, anything you drag from the plugin into your DAW is automatically saved to your file system. No more lost ideas.
2. Limitations
Make a beat using only a single synth. With the release of Serum 2, that’s less of a challenge than it used to be.
Or try building a track from a single sample. YouTube’s Four Producers, One Sample series' proves how creative constraints can lead to unexpected outcomes.
I often think about how some of the greatest music ever made came from the era of 8-track tape. Maybe having unlimited options isn’t as freeing as we’ve been led to believe.
3. The Compost Heap
You already have hundreds of potential song ideas buried in old projects. Dig through them and throw the best fragments onto a compost heap—a dedicated folder of promising sounds for future tracks.
If you’re using Ableton, you don’t even have to open old projects. Just browse the .ALS file to extract entire channels, synths, and MIDI clips.
If you make re-sampling a habit, your compost heap will always be growing. No need to bounce sounds manually from projects ever again.
Adopting these habits makes music feel effortless. And that’s the point. This isn’t work—it’s play, expression, excitement. Let’s not lose that.
See you next Thursday,
—Matthew
P.S. Seriously, reply. I do talk back.
P.P.S. I had no idea the streets of NYC were hiding so much musical talent.