I heard about a producer named Brian Eno (born Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno [yes, all that], produced albums for Talking Heads, U2, Devo… and worked with countless others) while listening to a broadcast of the ‘Ongoing History of New Music‘ by Alan Cross. Eno had a technique that I thought was absolutely ingenious. When he worked with a band in the studio and they became stuck on what to do to make a song work, he’d pull out a series of flash cards, each of which had a saying or slogan written on it to get you thinking about the task at hand in different ways. The idea was to pull out a single card, and do whatever that card said, even if it seemed odd at the time. These cards are now known as ‘Oblique Strategies’ and several editions have been released since the mid ’70s. There were a few that I personally found quite useful for either working with the band on writing/arranging, or producing/engineering in the studio, and because the copyright owner’s associates have shared some elsewhere on the web I’m going to assume that it will be okay for me to share a couple with you too.

Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.

• Faced with a choice, do both
• Convert a melodic element into a rhythmic element
• Don’t break the silence
• Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do
• What would your closest friend do?
• Use fewer notes
• Take away the important parts
• Do something boring
• Make a sudden destructive, unpredictable action; incorporate
• The tape is now the music
• Simple subtraction
• Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list
• Emphasize repetitions
• Retrace your steps
• Use “unqualified” people
• Assemble some of the instruments in a group and treat the group
• Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance
• Consult other sources
  • promising
  • unpromising
• What mistakes did you make last time?
• Simply a matter of work
• Reverse
• Give way to your worst impulse
• Are there sections? Consider transitions
• You don’t have to be ashamed of using your own ideas
• Humanize something free of error

There are over 100 cards in an Oblique Strategies deck and they work like magic at times. You can buy a deck from Eno Shop by clicking on ‘Oblique Strategies’. You can also scroll through the various sayings, or view them randomly here, but I’d recommend purchasing a physical deck to anyone working in a studio or writing and arranging songs.