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I go through the usual cycle I think everyone goes through of writing a few tunes, feeling like im progressing a bit, listening to a song for hours, hating it, closing the project and trying to forget about it and move on to the next thing. Recently I felt like I was progressing again, but I have noticed something odd with my last few weeks of tunes. Having listened back to things I have made, I started to feel as if everything I was writing had similar melody/rhythms and phrases, as if every tune I made somehow ended up with the same riff of subtle variations of that riff unintentionally (not always in the same key).

Upon trying to write more tunes I noticed myself falling into the same patterns, loops and melodies again as I was writing them, as if I couldn't actually come up with anything new and it has really started to annoy me to the point that as soon as I have a riff I think I like and expand on it I notice its similarities to everything I've written recently delete it all and give up for the night. Mostly it is the rhythm of the melody I feel like I keep repeating consistently with subtle variations in the pattern of the pitches. Part of me feels like I am just refining my own style and ideas towards a sound I like, and the other part of me just feels stuck like I am not moving on from this one idea I originally came up with months ago and just keep playing it over and over without realising at the time.

Has anyone else experienced this? I don't feel like I can't write anything at all, just I can't come up with anything new and just end up rewriting the same song every night over and over without realising and it is driving me insane. I try and just come up with something totally different, using a different key, different synths/samples, tempo etc but just end up with basically the same song I wrote the night before but a little different. Annoyed me so much I wanted to put my fist through my laptop a minute ago.

There seem to be a lot of these threads lately and I can kind of relate to what you're saying. It is easier to reuse melodies and such and fun to try to make them sound better, but I think you might just need to step out of your comfort zone a bit and really try something new. Don't be afraid to experiment with new things even if you're not really sure what you're doing, just go for it, or you could make house music and no one will care if it all sounds the same.

Benji wrote:or you could make house music and no one will care if it all sounds the same.

uh oh you're gonna piss off the house heads lol