New year, new sound
Looking to give yourself a creative boost in 2025? Here are our top tips
With 2024 over and done, we’re turning our focus to the New Year and all that comes with it. For many, that might mean joining the gym, giving up bad habits, or picking up healthy new ones. If you’re making music, however, we’ll bet you’ve given at least a little thought to advancing your art in 2025.
Here at ROLI, we’ve been doing the same, and we’ve collected some of our favorite ideas and advice below. Whether you’re stuck in a sonic slump or just looking for an extra creative spark, you’re sure to find some helpful tips in our list below.
New Year, new gear
We’ll start with the obvious: Sometimes a little (or a big) investment in yourself is the fastest way to reinvigorate your process — especially if it’s something that fundamentally changes the way you create. That’s something of a specialty here at ROLI, and the latest bit of kit to offer a new perspective on music-making is Airwave.
Whether you’re already creating with ROLI instruments, or using a standard MIDI controller, Airwave slots right into your existing setup and gives you the ability to play the air above your controller too. It tracks your hands in incredible detail and translates natural gestures into musical expression. Airwave is intuitive enough to start experimenting with right away, but integrates deeply enough with your sounds and software that it might just spark an entirely new direction for your music.
Collaborate
This timeless tip has been helping solo musicians break out of creative ruts long before New Year’s resolutions became a thing. No matter your current process, physical location, or genre, you can always find a way to refresh your own perspective by incorporating someone else’s.
Don’t feel like starting a band? Consider simply sharing what you’re working on and asking a trusted friend for feedback instead. Lacking a local scene? It’s 2025 — there’s likely a community that already exists for your music online. The ROLI Creator Community is a great place to start. This helpful group is full of like-minded musicians who are keen to offer advice and support to creators and producers of all genres.
Embrace limitations
This one's tried and tested too. Increasingly, it feels like technology gives us infinite options for making music. That’s great, for the most part, but it can feel somewhat paralyzing when making musical decisions and committing to them.
The solution? Remove the element of choice. Try limiting the number of channels in your DAW, working with one instrument only, or challenging yourself to create a track from a single sample. The idea here isn’t to constrain your creativity indefinitely but to spark inspiration by forcing yourself to think differently. Should inspiration strike, just keep following it — there’s no rule about changing the rules once the creative juices start flowing.
Try fresh sounds
We’re not all minimalists. Sometimes we just need a fresh start, and the New Year is as good a time as any for precisely that. Rather than reducing your sonic options, try injecting some new ones. Think about what’s caught your ear over the past year, and see if there’s anything new you might want to incorporate into your own sound. The easiest way to do this is often with sample packs, or new presets for your existing instruments. If you’re using ROLI soft synths or ROLI Studio, you’ll find a treasure trove of genre-specific Sound Packs in the ROLI store.
Learn something new
New Year is a time when plenty of us naturally begin taking up new things — with a new instrument being a popular choice. Often a different sound, different interface, or new expressive possibilities are just what we need to inspire new music.
We might be a little biased here, but if you’re looking to pick up piano in 2025 (or brush up on your existing keyboard skills) Piano M is a great way to get started. Aside from being an MPE-enabled MIDI controller, it pairs with the ROLI Learn app to teach you to play using a vast catalog of hit songs. Add Airwave and you have the ultimate piano-learning (and music-making) setup.
Revisit something old
Sometimes the best way to move forward is to begin by looking backwards. If you’re anything like us, you probably have a hard drive full of unfinished or unreleased sketches, sounds and ideas. Listen again with fresh ears and you’ll often find some gems — a synth patch that deserves a second chance, a guitar riff with greater potential, or maybe even a finished track that just needs a little polish. Remember too that your old projects can be a great source of sample fodder — there’s no need to clear samples when they come from your own unreleased tracks.
Get a change of scenery
Physically rearranging our space can be a great way to prompt for a mental refresh too. Studio space feeling cluttered? Get it under control before you sit down to make something new. Or, for perhaps the best way to get a fresh perspective on your sound, try getting out of your usual environment entirely. All you need is a pair of headphones and a laptop to turn the whole world into a studio. Add a handheld recorder, a portable controller (like the aforementioned Piano M, for example), and a little ingenuity and you’ll likely find that there’s very little you can’t do, wherever you are.
