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[J.W. Hendricks]

Everyone has a specifis way of writing music. I'm not talking about what kind of program you use. How does the music come to you? How do you make it what it is?

[Farbs]

I usually have an idea first about what the piece should convey (style of music, mood, how it fits into the game's soundscape etc). Then I just pick up an appropriate instrument and futz around with it until something useful comes out. If nothing useful comes out I pick up a different instrument and try again.

Once I have a couple of melodic or rhythmic sketches I try to flesh them out with a full arrangement (multiple instruments). With that done I then try to sew them together into a coherent piece.

Music really isn't my strength, but so far this has worked okay for me.

[J.W. Hendricks]

I usually have an idea of the mood, then I play random crap on my handy-dandy keyboard until something sounds good. It's worked out well so far.

[Mr. Yes]

I never have any idea what I'm doing before I start. In fact that's pretty much how I go about everything.

[Core Xii]

I usually have an idea first about what the piece should convey (style of music, mood, how it fits into the game's soundscape etc). Then I just pick up an appropriate instrument and futz around with it until something useful comes out. If nothing useful comes out I pick up a different instrument and try again.

This. It just happens. I open up the piano roll, pick a note to start from and just try different progressions. When I get one that sounds promising, I refine it in a few different directions. Then I combine those slightly different variations into a song, and build upon that.

[Craig Stern]

Ideas just come to me. I have a little portable recorder that I take with me, and when an idea comes to me, I hum it into the recorder. Later, I open up Sonar and recreate the tune there. Futzing around also occasionally gets me somewhere, but it's way less efficient.

[C418]

What, writing music? I thought it just appears in front of me.

[Farbs]

Paging Mr Alec Holowka. Mr Holowka please report to this thread immediately.

[Pigbuster]

Wandering around works best for me, especially when I'm outside. I come up with a hell of a lot of stuff waiting for the bus.

[C418]

Oh yeah, I do to. Unluckily, I forget most of the stuff I came up with when I'm at home.

[Problem Machine]

I mostly write a little bit, see how it feels to me, and decide based on that little snippet where I want to go with it, write some more, reevaluate, etc, until it's long enough. Then I spend a while cutting it up and rearranging it and building it up where it seems thin until it starts feeling kind of done-ish.

[Kekskiller]

When the time is right (like, extreme emotions) I fire up FL Studio, making ambiences or drumloops + filter arrangements until it sounds hypnotic in a way. This can take around a half hour and transforms me into a... musician. But suddenly there is that "zap" sound in my mind and I know how to build up my rythm, the melody, the track itself and just everything. I don't know how, I just know WHAT. I hate that. Soul-eating emotional brain shit

[NiallM]

I'll tend to have a vague idea what I want to do (what kind of sound/mood I'm going for etc.) and then I'll just fiddle about for a bit until I get something workable.  When it's good, things just seem to pour out effortlessly.  And then listening back, it almost feels as if someone else wrote it.  There's always this weird disconnect with the best things I've done - I was there at the time, and I did all the mouse-clicking, instrument-playing etc, but it still feels like it came from somewhere else...

When it's bad, I find it's best just to do something else, try again the next day.  Forcing things never got me anywhere.

[Biggerfish]

The shower is a great source of inspiration. Without fail, whenever I shower I get a tune in my head (of varying styles, length, quality, etc.). Sadly I never really get around to writing them down, but it has certainly helped my songwriting (being able to get a picture of a complete song just like that in my head).

When I actually write music I have been starting with a beat and building up from there, a lot of the time I get a nice 8-bar pattern that ends up being the focus of the song and building out from there.

The last thing I wrote though started out with my getting an idea for a melody in my head and then noodling it out on the piano for a solid hour until I was happy with it (it let me refine it and add in a left-hand part), I then took it into FL Studio and filled out all the others parts, the song structure sort of just came from the melody itself. I am now finding that a piano is a great way of composing melodies, it allows a lot more control than just placing notes in the piano roll, and feels a lot more natural.

Good practise to get songs out of my head and onto a piano roll or a piano or whatever always is to get an existing song and transposing it yourself. It will also help in hearing melodies since you can see things that different composers do.