George Whitty and Ellis Hall aka WHAT!!!! On Finding Their Creative Flow
THAT ELUSIVE CREATIVE FLOW and how to get there
Ellis and George come to the creative process from 2 very different angles, but with the same goal in mind: getting the most inspired, unimpeded creative flow going when writing songs, finding a way to get up on the wave rather than slogging away in the trough.
Ellis has composed more than 4,000 songs in his lifetime (!) and describes his process as grabbing hold of any fragment in his mind and taking the right instrument in hand and working to flesh it out from there. “My hands will start to tell me where to go be it on guitar or keyboard, and then just like a magical flow of water, it continues as my brain says OK, let’s go here or go there. Sometimes my brain goes way too fast, especially when it comes to the lyric. I love LOVE writing at all, but I particularly love writing the lyric.”
George describes himself as a classic case of overly-perfectionistic writer’s block; even by age 30 he’d finished only a handful of songs. What changed? He got a gig writing music for “As The World Turns”, which paid about $60 per minute of music they used on the show. “Go ahead, spend a year writing Beethoven’s 5th symphony, you’d never make a dime. VOLUME was the secret to getting cues placed from the show’s library.” So George learned what he calls the “rule of 80%”: Get the cue to where it’s 80% good, then KEEP MOVING. Do the next section. Put it away and start the next one. Don’t get hung up or stop because it’s not The Perfect Cue To End All Cues. 80%. “The next day?
Inevitably I’d start with fresh ears and get it to 90%. And that was often what I’d turn in. 20 cues later, with this kind of crass pay-by-the-minute formula, my new 80% was where my previous 90% had been. And understanding my own process that way, I wrote 250 cues for that and 2 other shows. And FINISHING so many tracks got me to where I write with a great flow and typically don’t spend much more than a few inspired hours on a piece of music. “Die Living” from our new CD is an example; it pretty much sounded like the final cut after just a couple hours of good flow.”
SOME POINTS TO CONSIDER as you work to get the maximum positive flow to your writing:
Ellis points out that to him, writing on the right INSTRUMENT helps him to get in the groove. From our new CD “‘Some Days Were Meant For Rain’ was written on guitar, ‘Itch In Your Ear’ started with a bass idea, ‘Soul Street’ I wrote on a keyboard”, he says.
“Let each tune be what it is” suggests George. “Trying to shoehorn too much into one track starts an internal competition to make this many-headed hydra work. One focussed hydra head is better, the most direct line to a strong finished product.
From Ellis: “Flow with it while it’s flowing, but don’t force it. Once you are in that zone where you can’t sleep because of it, write then.” George adds: “Just get something going. You’ll know where it needs to go from there, and the more you write, the more sure your sense of what needs to come next”
And on that note, “Learn to get things framed but not necessarily finished, so the ideas can keep flowing without you stopping to ‘perfect’ things; the minute The Perfectionist shows up, half your mind is diverted off of the original inspiration” says George.
Ellis likes to sit with a guitar or keyboard and get close to figuring the whole tune out before he hits “record”. He writes his lyrics on a Braille typewriter, but has the whole idea mostly composed without engaging any technology first. But George likes to hear a little something to build on, so he sketches into the machine as he goes. “Hearing it back without playing it myself prompts “what comes next”, he says.
On that note, George advises to “get as fluid as you can using your software to quickly bang in ideas; any ‘mechanical’ impediment diverts resources from your creative side to your logical side. Something as simple as a key command for “Record/Record Repeat” in Logic lets you execute takes as quickly as possible, so you don’t get bogged down in mechanics.”
About Ellis Hall and George Whitty: Ellis and George together are WHAT!!!!, a pairing of two master musicians, making a great modern Soul CD for the ages. Ellis’s credits include 4 years singing lead and writing for Tower of Power, performing with The Spinners, Earth, Wind and Fire, Michael McDonald, and the Ray Charles Experience. George is a multiple Grammy-wiinning, Emmy-winning composer, producer and player who has worked with Carlos Santana, Celine Dion, Herbie Hancock, Chaka Khan, Grover Washington and Richard Bona. The debut CD of WHAT!!!!, “In The World” drops January 17, and the first single, “Die Living”, is already reaching millions of listeners weekly on FM and Internet radio and streaming services.
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