Photo by Steve Wheeler

More often than not, one thing leads to another. Particularly where creativity is concerned, I have learnt that one small event, thought or action can trigger several more, and you never know where the sequence will take you. In the words of that great philosopher Diana Ross, I’m in the middle of a chain reaction*.

Last week I purchased a loop pedal. It’s a Boss RC-3 Loop Station, similar to the one made famous by Ed Sheeran during his live shows (Yes, I know Sheeran uses a more sophisticated set up, but the idea is the same). For those unfamiliar with the world of music, I can connect my Fender Stratocaster guitar through the pedal into the amplifier, and when I tap the pedal, it begins recording and overlaying whatever I play into it, until I tap it again. In a few brief minutes I’m sounding like an entire orchestra of guitars. It’s quite an amazing effect and opens up plenty of creative opportunities.

So I tried out my new pedal and within a short time, managed to get to grips with how it works. It was great fun. I then started playing some of my old compositions, and it occurred to me that perhaps I should capture the words of these old songs. I put my guitar down and opened up my laptop, and in a few minutes was busily remembering and writing down the lyrics of the songs I had written so many years ago.

As I saved the documents, other words began coming into my head. So I opened up some more Word documents and wrote down the ideas. Creativity is innate within each of us – often though, it isn’t expressed until a trigger event sets it going. It started off with me purchasing a new piece of music technology. And now I’m writing a blog post about my experience … and the creative process continues….

* Yeah, I know it was a song written by the fabulous Gibb brothers. Don’t shoot me. 

Creative processes by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.