ADHD and Music

If you have ADHD you have a huge advantage in music career.

The nonstop racing of your mind and the attention spread can be used to your advantage as in the creative mind of a music maker there are multiple lanes of focus that are constatly engaged even if your aren’t aware: composing / mixing / mastering. Sedatitives or stimulants can make life easier but it is strongly advised not to over do them and to bear in mind that using might lead to addiction, which would not only ruin your creative process but would take huge impact on your life.

Alcohol gets you slowed down so your thoughts won’t race too fast and you can keep up with them and be able to make them work instead of just see them as a thunder strikes that are beautiful but you weren’t able to take a picture of them as they happend so fast.

Stimulants like coffe/coke aka caffeine or even stronger stuff like amphetamine makes you focused so you can catch up with the fast train of thoughts and you can lay ideas down pretty fast while you can keep track on the main direction of your art without being lost in the details. Stimulants could cause sleep deprivation if you dive in to making music for a late session that might end still being up in the morning. Some artist have really good ideas at this state, that also happen to occur when you just arrive home after a party in the morning and you feel filled up with emotions and ideas. Sleep deprived brain also happens to be processing much slower and in different ways as you are kind of try to fall asleep.

A much healthier way to deal with the racing brain is to get to work as soon as you wake up. This puts you on a straight lane of thoughts before you might be lost on the details of what to eat for breakfast or got distracted from a post that drives your attention to another topic than what you would aimed for that day.

Now let’s see the advantages of ADHD in producing.

We all know that producing a track is a long process that needs to be divided in to important phases like: 1 creating the melody 2 arrangement of the song 3 mixing of the track 4 mastering of the track. The fun fact is that an ADHD brain with quite a rutin of all the phases starts to break the rules and ignites itself to a state where the attention span kicks in but this time with a huge benefit of speeding up the process to unbeliveable speed. Normal people don’t think about the lowend of the starting melodies sound design, and start to immediately lowcut it and making a second sound as a bass to fillup the space, and than make a ghost kick to side chain it so they could hear how the patterns will clash with the kick that hasn’t been created yet, but ADHD ones do.

They can’t separate phases and they do all the steps at once because they are thinking so forward they might already hear how it will sound mastered and because they hear it they immediately lay it down and might throw a mastering chain on top of only a melody part because they already know how it should sound in the breakdown part. Our lead engineer Teddy Coke used to say that creating electronic music is like creating a perfect system for that track. It has sidechain rules, pattern rules, stereo image placing rules, everything has a function and a role in the whole system.

ADHD brain visualizes the whole in a blink of an eye thus already know what comes where, instead of a normal process where you would go step by step brick by brick to build it up from the foundation to the top and everymove would be based on choices made before the next step. Advanced sound desgin seems to slow down the race and modular systems are also a good thing to have beacuse it gives a both entertaining and challenging playground for the creative brain. It is fun because of exotic opportunities and also because of the ineviatible rule system that comes with modular, as creating a series of rules that are based on each other is a very effective way to create a chainreaction with just a small change. ADHD brain works thisway when creating music and doing all at once as they’re wired to understand and calculate the effect of a sound on the whole composition thru a mastering chain in relation to the pattern sequences, like a super computer that processes any formula you throw at it. They are so fast and forward thinking or should I say calculating that they already do the mixing while composing and are composing with mastering in mind and mastering with references in their heads.

There is only one downside of ADHD in music: they often overwrite or over compose or overdo processing. We have special methods to train their brain to recognise when it is enough, as some of our engieers also work happily with ADHD. A useful tip if you may struggle with the symptom of jumping between sound back and forth and end up creating a lot of groovy hook lines that are not really related to each other or are simply not harmonizing in a way you want them to be: grab one polyphonic synth, imageine that it is an analog instrument in front of you, it is your only instrument that can be used and you need to create with only this one and on only one midi lane. Try to make it work from that one istrument, you’ll see everynote relation and you will be able to create chords and movements. The other way: create only chords with one instrument and than break up those chords in to separate pattern sequences, they wll all be lined up well because they are part of the already layed down harmony, advanced trick try to make movement in the separate sequences too.

On a mixing mastering side of things one with ADHD should try to identify the roles, and number them in order of importance and try to mix from the most important to the least important, or a another method can be to create a mix in the order of apperance of sound, and with the hint in mind that you should always enogh room for the next one, so if your lead would come in at last, you should leave room for it and so on. Also try to number things and also try to give them roles in freqs, like mid bass roller, sub bass etc.