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Oblique Strategies: ideas for creative lateral thinking

Oblique Strategies is a list of ideas to help break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking.

  • Abandon normal instruments

  • Accept advice

  • Accretion

  • A line has two sides

  • Allow an easement (an easement is the abandonment of a stricture)

  • Are there sections? Consider transitions

  • Ask people to work against their better judgement

  • Ask your body

  • Assemble some of the instruments in a group and treat the group

  • Balance the consistency principle with the inconsistency principle

  • Be dirty

  • Breathe more deeply

  • Bridges -build -burn

  • Cascades

  • Change instrument roles

  • Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency

  • Children's voices -speaking -singing

  • Cluster analysis

  • Consider different fading systems

  • Consult other sources -promising -unpromising

  • Convert a melodic element into a rhythmic element

  • Courage!

  • Cut a vital connection

  • Decorate, decorate

  • Define an area as `safe' and use it as an anchor

  • Destroy -nothing -the most important thing

  • Discard an axiom

  • Disconnect from desire

  • Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them

  • Distorting time

  • Do nothing for as long as possible

  • Don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do

  • Don't be frightened of cliches

  • Don't be frightened to display your talents

  • Don't break the silence

  • Don't stress one thing more than another

  • Do something boring

  • Do the washing up

  • Do the words need changing?

  • Do we need holes?

  • Emphasize differences

  • Emphasize repetitions

  • Emphasize the flaws

  • Faced with a choice, do both (given by Dieter Rot)

  • Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation

  • Fill every beat with something

  • Get your neck massaged

  • Ghost echoes

  • Give the game away

  • Give way to your worst impulse

  • Go slowly all the way round the outside

  • Honor thy error as a hidden intention

  • How would you have done it?

  • Humanize something free of error

  • Imagine the music as a moving chain or caterpillar

  • Imagine the music as a set of disconnected events

  • Infinitesimal gradations

  • Intentions -credibility of -nobility of -humility of

  • Into the impossible

  • Is it finished?

  • Is there something missing?

  • Is the tuning appropriate?

  • Just carry on

  • Left channel, right channel, centre channel

  • Listen in total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly

  • Listen to the quiet voice

  • Look at a very small object, look at its centre

  • Look at the order in which you do things

  • Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them

  • Lowest common denominator check -single beat -single note -single

  • riff

  • Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame

  • Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last

  • thing on the list

  • Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate

  • Mechanicalize something idiosyncratic

  • Mute and continue

  • Only one element of each kind

  • (Organic) machinery

  • Overtly resist change

  • Put in earplugs

  • Remember those quiet evenings

  • Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics

  • Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities

  • Repetition is a form of change

  • Reverse

  • Short circuit (example: a man eating peas with the idea that they will

  • improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap)

  • Shut the door and listen from outside

  • Simple subtraction

  • Spectrum analysis

  • Take a break

  • Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance

  • Tape your mouth (given by Ritva Saarikko)

  • The inconsistency principle

  • The tape is now the music

  • Think of the radio

  • Tidy up

  • Trust in the you of now

  • Turn it upside down

  • Twist the spine

  • Use an old idea

  • Use an unacceptable color

  • Use fewer notes

  • Use filters

  • Use "unqualified" people

  • Water

  • What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate

  • What is the reality of the situation?

  • What mistakes did you make last time?

  • What would your closest friend do?

  • What wouldn't you do?

  • Work at a different speed

  • You are an engineer

  • You can only make one dot at a time

  • You don't have to be ashamed of using your own ideas

  • [blank white card]

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