do you use music as a conduit for your creative muse?
Absolutely... Bach's piano music works best for me, but some Indian sitar music does it as well.
It has to be instrumental... anything with lyrics tends to distract me.
I would advise stilts for the quagmires, and camels for the snowy hills
And any survivors, their debts I will certainly pay. There's always a way!
I like to write generally in near silence, but if I need distracting, "Classic Rock", Strauss Waltzes, Holst The Planets, JM Jarre (Oxygene mainly), Vangelis (either side of and including Chariots of Fire era).
I've loved this since I was a child of eight or nine... I can listen to Neptune, the Mystic on repeat, ad infinitum... ethereal beauty.
In a way, I'm pleased that Pluto recently got downgraded to a dwarf planet... the planetary Solar System now fits The Planets suite again.
The recent addition of a newly-composed Pluto to the suite was sacrilege, in my view.
I would advise stilts for the quagmires, and camels for the snowy hills
And any survivors, their debts I will certainly pay. There's always a way!
I guess it depends on what Im in the mood for, I've done some very action-esque pieces to instrumentals from various movies. (Like the Transformers 2 soundtrack) I used to write ALOT for various roleplay forums, and was putting pages of stuff on the internet for a timelimit so that the story could continue with the other authors. This sort of co-writing while relaxed, could really wear on you, so I tended to listen to music just to keep me from burning out and such. After losing interest in such things, I tend to fall back on the pieces what I wrote my first story to.
Mostly I'm a metal head (decent stuff, not winey, faux epic, emo toss) but pretty much anything and everything.
Have to have a bit of metal on when writing an action scene.
Being a musician too, I find that I end up timing some keyboard hits to accents in the music what ever I'm listening too.
Opeth are pretty much my go to band for awesomeness at the moment, especially the album Damnation.
As for soundtracks, I love the main theme to The Black Hole.
I find that the soundtrack albums to Babylon 5 are the best music to write to. All of the Tarklin stories (first and second iterations) were written whilst listening to those.
If I'm writing a reflective piece then I find Vangelis' Oceanic is calming enough to get me "in synch" with what I'm trying to write. Unfortunately, it tends to send me to sleep...
