Another thing to get the creativity up is to experiment with other musicians. You could join various jams, craigslist is a good source of finding what’s going on. Or then ask around, or find out what’s going on.

The nice thing with playing other musicians is that you really never know the outcome. Which is for me very liberating — after living years and years inside a production studio and controlling every aspect of the production.

Sometimes the whole of it all sounds very inspiring, compared with you controlling every aspect.

As a DJ, it is not so hard to hook together two systems with MIDI synchronization. In the case of Ableton Live, read the manuals that has the info. You only need MIDI in/out ports on your audio card/box. Then one could play tracks and the other annotates them, and you could switch roles. Or even more fancy, do a totally free-form jam with dance tracks.

It is the unexpected result that is the interesting aspect when working with other musicians. It’s fun to fine-tune a performance, as well. But for me, the interesting thing is when multiple musicians get together and have a good way of communicating and creating music on the spot.