Stop Fighting Your Muse: How to Trick Your Musical Ideas Into Behaving

Marika Speck
Aug 24
3 min read

So you sat down at the piano, strummed your guitar, or stared menacingly at your DAW until a melody finally crawled out of your brain. Nice work!

But… after two bars, your brain goes:

“Nope. That’s all you get. Good luck finishing the symphony with THAT.”

We’ve all been there. Sometimes inspiration hits like lightning, other times it’s like trying to squeeze juice out of a brick. The trick isn’t waiting for genius to show up. The trick is learning how to mess with whatever little idea you do have until it mutates into something bigger.

I call this “stress-testing your idea.” Think of your musical sketch as a toddler—you’ve got to throw it around a bit, see how resilient it is, and maybe dress it up in weird outfits until you realize it’s actually kinda brilliant.

The Secret Bach Probably Knew (But Never Put in a Tweet)

Musicologists tell us that Johann Sebastian Bach didn’t always compose in a nice, orderly line from bar one to bar 200. Nope. He tinkered. He poked. He flipped things around. He Frankensteined sections together.

Basically, Bach was a remix artist trapped in the 1700s.

So if you’re feeling blocked, don’t try to write your piece straight through like you’re filing taxes. Instead, take your baby idea and start stress-testing it. Bend it, break it, stretch it, and if it survives, congratulations, you’ve got material!

Ridiculous Ways to Abuse—uh, I mean Test—Your Musical Ideas

Here’s a giant list of things you can do to keep yourself entertained (and to keep your idea from getting boring).

Melodic Shenanigans

Play it backwards. Bonus points if it summons the devil.
Squish it, stretch it, transpose it—basically, treat it like musical silly putty.
Start on a different note just to see if it sulks.
Go full mad scientist and serialize it into a 12-tone monstrosity.
Pretend you’re a jazz saxophonist who just got lost.

Structural Mischief

Chop it into little fragments like musical confetti.
Loop it until your neighbors beg you to stop.
Stretch it until it sounds like whale song.
Shove it into a different form: sentence, period, compound-periodic-mutant-thing.
Imagine it’s the coda when it really just wanted to be the intro.

Contrapuntal Chaos

Write a counter-melody that insults it.
Change the meter—make it dance awkwardly in 5/4.
Switch the mode—major to minor, happy to emo.

Physical Experiments

Sing it loudly in the shower.
Play it on an instrument you definitely don’t know how to play.
Conduct it like you’re leading a Broadway finale.

Harmonic Tomfoolery

Harmonize it in thirds, fourths, or sevenths just to see what falls apart.
Drop it onto a completely different chord progression like it’s karaoke night.
Use 20th-century harmony tricks until it sounds like Stravinsky falling down stairs.

Orchestration Hijinks

Give it to the tuba. Everything is funnier on tuba.
Shove it up into piccolo range and regret your life choices.
Imagine it as a string quartet or a kazoo ensemble

General Nonsense

Make it absurdly simple.
Make it unnecessarily complicated.
Pretend John Williams wrote it. Pretend John Cage wrote it. Pretend you didn’t write it.

The Punchline

The point here isn’t to make perfect music on the first try, it’s to play games with your idea until something clicks. You’re not composing linearly, you’re exploring sideways, diagonally, and upside-down.

In other words: stop waiting for the muse to deliver a finished masterpiece. She’s lazy. She only delivers tiny, annoying sparks. Your job is to poke those sparks with a stick until one of them sets the house on fire.