30. Crafting Music through Moodboards

In this episode of The Music Executive, host Cinnamon Denise explores the innovative idea of using mood boards to enhance the music production process. 

Inspired by a YouTube series from a fashion designer, Cinnamon decided to implement mood boards to visually represent song concepts, aiding in decision-making and creativity. The episode details steps for creating and utilizing a mood board, aligning musical elements to it, and maintaining discipline throughout the songwriting process. Listeners are encouraged to share their experiences and name suggestions for the newly created tune.

Chapters

• 1:04 Creating a Mood Board for Music Production
• 2:02 Step-by-Step Guide to Making a Mood Board
• 5:10 Assigning Musical Elements to Your Mood Board
• 8:45 Finalizing Your Music Production

Transcript

Hey y'all. So I was recently watching a YouTube series from a fashion designer about her design process, and she was sharing how she conceptualizes, creates a mood board, edits that mood board, et cetera, before she even begins thinking about fabrics or anything like that, right? Her YouTube series was really fascinating and really inspired me and is part of the inspiration behind why I'm currently learning how to sew.

But ultimately she got me thinking maybe I should make a mood board for. A production the next time I sit down to write some music. Now to take a quick pause. If you're not familiar with what a mood board is, it's essentially a visual representation of a set of ideas or a visual presentation of a set of ideas.

It can be a collage that kind of serves as a creative North Star for most, if not all visual processes, fashion designers. Graphic designers, sculptors, set designers for theater, all use mood boards in their process. So it dawned on me. Why don't I do this? Why not create a mood board for my productions?

And I did this for a song and I must tell you that I have not created another piece of music production at all without creating a mood board. First, as we go through this episode, I made the mood board that I'll be referring to as a cover art for this episode, just for fun. Be nice y'all. So today's episode is that process, how I've refined it for music production, and hopefully by the end of the episode.

You'll give it a try and let me know how it goes for you. I'm feeling sentimental. Hey, music executives, welcome to the Music Executive, a show where we dive into what it takes to build a sustainable, profitable, and holistic music career. I'm Cinnamon Denise, your host, and I am a music media producer, singer, songwriter, bassist, and of course, your friend on this journey.

If you're a full-time, part-time, or hobbyist in the music industry. You're certainly in the right place. I started the music executive to address the common obstacles we face in this industry, but more specifically how these obstacles directly impact our mental and physical wellbeing. Let's do this.

Music executives, ultimately, the first step in this process is to pick a song concept. Now, y'all don't overthink this. A song concept, like just think of an idea and stick to that idea. This is basically the equivalent of being like, today I'm gonna make a nice winter scape and put a barn here in a nice sunset.

The end. Just a concept, and if you're not sure of the details of your concept, that's okay. On the flip side of that, try to not be too detailed because you'll take a little bit of the natural creativity out of this process. My concept was the following. Someone lets someone fall in love with them, knowing that they had no intention of loving them back.

I know super original, very Swifty esque, but I was like, I'm inspired enough. Now the other thing, this is my opinion, you do not have to write about something that you have ever experienced. Like it's not a rule that you have to have experienced something to write a song about it. You just gotta be convincing.

As producers, musicians, songwriters, we are storytellers. No one said the story had to be true. It just has to be believable. And so the second step in this process is to create the mood board. I hear y'all already. I don't know how to draw. I'm not artsy, blah, blah, blah. No ma'am. Go to Google, Unsplash, whatever.

Log into Canva, Photoshop, and if you're not familiar with any of those, get a blank piece of paper. Some scissors and a marker. I don't care. Do what you gotta do and begin to create a mood board that represents this song concept, your song concept. So my mood board had the following. I had the background as this raspberry color to kind of represent this like burn the love.

It's like a peachy. Red, dark red, and I have these little fire images, but I flip them upside down, right? Because I, as the narrator, I'm angry. I'm angry that this person let me fall in love with them, but they have no intention of loving me, but I'm not gonna let my anger consume me. And I also put the fire at the top of the image because for me, it also felt like I wanted these elements of my mood board to visually be the order that I experienced them in.

So from top down, rage, anger, fire. Now below that I have just some text that says, really, and I feel like if you say that you get it right, like someone let you fall in love with them, knowing that they have no intent loving you back. Really. And below that, I have these three emojis that are intended to be disappointment.

Frustration and a little bit of sadness all wrapped up in one. I'm sad, but not crying. Sad. Sad. So the emoji just looks like it's about to cry, but it's not crying because I decided that the narrator is not giving the sad girl energy. Just a little sad. And then below that, I have clouds and they look like rain clouds, but again, they're not raining.

There is sadness, but not like despair. And again, this is the episode artwork for this episode. If you just wanna reference that, and if you're anything like me when you're doing this part, give yourself a time limit. Otherwise you'll sit doing a mood board for way too long. So I took about 15 minutes to do this, and you decide for yourself, would you have time for.

The third step in this process is to take this mood board and assign air quotes musical elements to it. So musical elements would be things like the tempo instrumentation chords, some lyric ideas, and I'm gonna share that process in real time with the elements that I chose. So first of all, the color right?

I had to think about the. The color, this raspberry color that I'm talking about, and I actually started with just picking an instrument sound, and here is that sound.

Now, like the color is kind of dark but not super dark. Like it still has a little bit of lightness to it. Right? There's still like a high taste to it. Y'all have synesthesia, so like, bear with me on what I'm explaining right now, but it does, it's like it has a darkness, but still not overbearingly dark.

And I mean with the delay and everything, we still kind of got like. A vibe going here. Um, as far as the fire, I will say the tempo on this track is 124 beats per minute.

Not like crazy, but it's like it's moving right? Your heart, like this is a good, this is the heart rate that I have when I walk, right? This is the heart rate that I have when I'm like going for a morning walk. And I'll say too, I added this base part here, which helped me kind of get grounded and it did feel like this was the fire to me, this was the fire, like this is the kind of the over ominous fire clouds, if you will.

As far as, let's say, these percussion elements, the drum elements I was choosing things that. Kind of made this track feel like it was faster than it really was, um, which kind of helped this frustrated disappointment, sad girl energy. It's like this push and pull of, of emotions, and I wanted the drums to make this feel like it's going fast, but it's not going super fast.

And mind you, it's very like disjunct. It's very all over the place. And I kind of like that. I like that it was like, what the heck is going on? Um, let me play it from the beginning.

There he goes. He's like, he's a combination of a two and a hat, um, two hat. He's like, he's saying it's this guy saying two with this high hat. That felt like this also juxtaposition, like too many different things going on at the same time. Um, of course I had to gotta like draw this in, go back to drawing board, tighten it up.

But man, that's kind of fun. And I want to iterate that when you're doing this, be very vigilant. If something you do doesn't support what you created in your mood board, it doesn't go in this production. It's something you write doesn't support your song concept. It doesn't go in this production. The only wrong decisions here are the ones you can't justify making.

And so the other part of this is don't go back to your mood board and change what was on it just to make the music you want to create. Trust the process. Trust me. Trust yourself. Trust your song concept. The last step is of course, creating the music and this step plus the previous one. Assigning musical elements do have a tiny bit of overlap, but do your best to make an actual transition to this final step when you're ready and not revert.

Back. So I took my elements and started to arrange them, and at this point I've decided I'm not gonna change much. You know, I'm gonna stick with the sounds I've got. I'm gonna stick with the tempo I've got, I'm gonna stick with the instrumentation just for the sake of the exercise. Any lyrical decisions that I made also had to support.

This part as well. Any melodic existence decisions I made also had to support this as well. Now, what is likely going to happen, or at least what happens often when I guide someone through this process? They are so much faster at making decisions. They know what is a yes and they know what is a no. Also, they get tempted to go back to the concept and kind of adjust it to fit whatever they want to do.

But remember this. Process. This exercise requires a bit of discipline, and lastly, they get through the songwriting and production process much faster. Please know that the intent behind this episode is not to speed up the music making process. Music takes time. Actually. The intent is to help us learn better decision making.

During the music creation process so we don't waste our time decisiveness. Alright, that is it for this episode and I hope you found it helpful if you did share it with the homies and I'll leave you with a more fleshed out snippet of this tune that I still don't have a name for. If you have an idea for the name of this tune, you can actually message the show at the link in the show notes.

So yeah, I'd love to hear from y'all. This isn't easy y'all, but it is fun.