Fastest way of getting from ideas to composition

1] Be Prepared To Record Musical Ideas When Inspiration Strikes - I use an mp3 player with a little digital recorder in it, but you can also just have a mic set up at your computer to be ready to record whenever you have an idea - developing this into a habit will immeasurably aid your compositional life! The less steps you need to take before you can hit record, the more you’ll get into the habit

2] Record Ideas With A Voice Recorder When They Occur To You - always, always hum/sing/beatbox your melodies or arrangements whenever you have them floating around in your head! even I, who’ve practiced the skill of making notes on paper to remind me of ideas later, forget 80% of everything I think I’ll remember later

3] Remember To Offload Your Recorded Sketches! - now, here’s an important step: import the audio into your DAW and slice it up according to bars or what have you; if you’re skilled at such things stretch and snap them to tempo - maybe making it a thing to do every day before you brush your teeth getting ready for bed; being an insomniac and thus schedule-less I just try to remember as I can

4] Don’t Get Bogged Down With Technicalities! - load a simple VST sound module or whatnot and mouse or play in the midi score of the sung part! - don’t fret over sound design and effects and mixing at this point, just paint the bare bones of melody or structure or whatever your idea was… if it’s non-tonal information - drums, or morphing whooshes - just concentrate on the (admittedly embarassing to hear) sound effects you’ve hummed to get the parts in some sort of shape that you can add parallel midi tracks to - keep it simple and make progress on the composition before you mess with mixing and all that; it’s all too easy to get caught up in the attention-sapping death ray of the computer monitor

5] Audio-To-Midi? - if your DAW supports it, or if you have a plug-in which does this - use audio-to-midi to generate the score automatically, and then just clean it up later

6] Rhythm Has Priority Over Melody Or Especially Harmony When Sketching - simple sound modules are best for chordal and melodic ideas! if you’re sounding out some chords, play them with a piano sound and always just use the same sound so that the idea gets recorded and mess with the details later

a really fast way of doing this to make it sound rhythmically natural is just play *one* chord to get the “feel” down and go back and edit the specific notes after the fact; all you really need to do to make a natural performance is bonk one chord if you can’t play keyboard well enough to just knock out the idea verbatim when you think of it

this works equally well for drums - when you’re just sketching out a rhythm idea, don’t try to nail the kick, snare and hi-hat pattern all at once - just pick a snare sound with whatever you can configure to get the lowest latency and play just that sound to capture the midi - then you can go back and edit with your mouse, re-do the other percussion sounds on parallel tracks, looping repeating parts that you’ve nailed and what have you

7] Ghost Channels - I don’t know if this is possible in anything other than FLStudio, which is what I use to compose, but in that app you can see the midi on other tracks while you compose in the active tracks as grayed-out notes… even better is to copy/paste the notes into the track you’re working on and “change the color” which makes them trigger a diferent midi channel so, while they’re not heard when you hit play you can actually manipulate other tracks’ chords or whatnot in the track you’re working on, so everything’s side by side (and paste it back into the original track if you end up making changes) - it’s a really rapid way to, say, add a bassline to a sequence of chords

8] Template For When Inspiration Strikes - go to the trouble to make a template in your DAW that you can load (preferably as the default that auto-loads when you instantiate your DAW) which already has an armed audio track ready to record and a couple tracks to record midi, prehaps a piano, a lead instrument and a drum module depending on your genre’s particular needs; just remember to “save as” and rename the project with the date and someting that’ll jog your memory later

9] Create A Works-In-Progress Folder - and go to the effort to describe your ideas with an attached note for each project, archive them and revisit them! having everything set up without a lot of CPU-hogging plug-ins that’ll slow down your progress when inspired will ensure you knock out those creative flashes into a useable form

10] Division Of Labor - just as you shouldn’t compose when staring at the screen, you should also save routine PC maintainance for downtime when you’re not feeling like making music - and I of all people should keep this in mind: experimentation isn’t the same as composition! When you’re testing out new methods of sound mangling *save* those presets or complex DSP chains + automation however your DAW allows you to do so for re-use later… start a series of folders with different sounds - basses you’ve designed, pre-made guitar + ampsim combos, weird synth presets - so you can have an armory from already-designed, unique sound design you can draw from and tweak when you’re making songs - if you get bogged down in sound design it could easily distract you for hours when you’re attempting to simply get a song structure put together

11] Post-It Notes On The Monitor - don’t be shy about leaving notes on your monitor to remind you to keep what’s really got to get done, or to remind you of what’s most important at whatever stage in a project you’re at and it’s not a bad idea to have a big piece of paper taped up nearby where you can draw flowcharts of album ideas and keep notes on what particular stage you’re at for each song - maybe one needs some lyrics, maybe you have to remember to contact a collaborator to send you their solo track; probably the most important one to remember is it’s rarely a good idea to step up to the piano roll without any ideas - compose away from the computer! or you’re likely to just get bogged down in minutiae

There’s some advice. Hope it helps someone!