How do you compose? (workflow, etc...)

Hi, everyone!

Since composing is mostly a creative, free and complicated procedure which happens in mind my question cannot really be specified further without restraining some of your ways to compose.

But I want to give a guideline so that it becomes clearer what I want to know:

-how and when do you collect/organise your ideas (immediate write on stickies, etc.., mindmapping, any computer program)

-how do you develop/plan your ideas/concepts?

-which steps do you make to write your music? (free drawings of the concept...reduced for piano...the whole score at once...) With pen and paper? Finale, Sibelius, Lilypond...? (Please no Sibelius/Finale war)

-do you have a prefered workspace/desk? What are the elements of it? (computer programs...)

Ok, that's it. I hope that there will be many interesting ways on how to compose.

use the search function.

Score at once, but I'm a freak... the idea of composing each part separately scares me, and I usually end up giving up quite quickly. My mind works very quickly, so I'm always getting ideas. Sometimes I think to myself, I wonder what it would sound like if I... and that's usually all it takes to be off on some new adventure.

I usually compose full score from the start. I only recently started thinking in terms of piano reduction, but I'm also growing as a piano player, and piano is much more comfortable to me now then when I first started composing. If I get an idea, it is jotted down quickly. I almost always keep a small sketch book with me, which has lots of unstarted ideas waiting to happen for all sorts of musical projects, also, I will write it down on 'sticky-notes' that are built in on my computer. I also often take down the notes on a notepad built into my phone, and then transfer them elsewhere later. When an idea hits, I always have some way of writing it. I always input directly into Finale (my preference) unless I just wanna quickly play out a musical idea, in which case I will play it into garage band with a click track. My hand-written music notation is so out of practice and sloppy, I find myself spending more time trying to make my notation legible, rather than spending time writing the music, so it's best if I go directly to computer.

I come from a songwriting background and therefore, I tend to start with the main melody as well as the colour/vibe/mood I want to create. I will jot this down on whatever piece of paper I can find (I'm also a fiction writer and therefore always carry a notebook with me, which is a habit I highly recommend).

Afterwards, I will transfer it to notation paper and develop the idea. I sometimes create full stories where each instrument represents one character and each of them has its own story arc, and I then try to express this through music instead of words.

Once I have the main idea/theme and the direction/mood worked out, I will input it into Finale (I'm still using Finale Songwriter but I plan to upgrade to Allegro).

To compose the other instrumental parts, I tend to work by groups of 4 or 6 bars and compose all the parts through for them, then I move to the next block.