Vaporizing and creativity. What is your experience?

[jeffp]

I feel that this subject is so important and relevant and yet sort of overlooked - it should have its own thread. I think one of the reasons the subject of vaping which is really the subject of MJ is so infinitely interesting to us is because of the reflective nature of the herb's power and how it clarifies consciousness and enhances creativity. At least that is my experience.

What about implementation and staying on task, especially for projects that require perhaps six months or longer to complete? How is it possible to stay on task when brand new unrelated ideas pop into your mind and impress and distract you - what do you do about that?

Anybody keep an idea journal when they're high? I have a few - sometimes what I see the next day seems crap but not always.

Anybody play a musical instrument or write songs? Pot and music are so deeply connected but how does being stoned affect your coordination while playing?

I'll stop here as I must...

 

[Stu]

Anybody play a musical instrument or write songs? Pot and music are so deeply connected but how does being stoned affect your coordination while playing?

I'll stop here as I must...

I play as good if not better when stoned. It's only after a few beers that I start getting sloppy.

 

[Deadhead101]

I play guitar, and I notice that, under the influence, I can get wrapped up in my playing and really dive into some deep hyper-focus. When this happens successfully I lose track of time and am completely immersed in the music.

I remember a clip from the documentary the Botany of Desire that discussed the popularity of weed among jazz musicians from the 50's. Their reasoning was about the same as mine; it helped them focus and also allowed them to delve deeper into improvisation.

 

[djonkoman]

I'm creative in a problemsolving sense(I'm focussed on usefullness), but not really doing any 'creative activities' like playing music. never played an instrument, and never will, and I'm glad I got trough musicclass in highschool without learning anything(we had to learn to read notes, how to tune a guitar and how to play a few of those things you play on a guitar, don't know the english name)
pretty much all my friends play an instrument tough.
my creativity also shines trough sometimes in making fun of a friend(for example once I created a kind of failed superhero around one of my friends, imagined an outfit, a supervillain, superpowers etc, and he was called 'naaiman', sewing man, altough naaien also means fucking in dutch, so it has a double meaning)
never write it down since I always remember it

 

[chris 71]

i have thought about this often. i am a sculptor/carver and a regular user.
i have always been creative even as a little kid my favorite toy was plastercine, i would make all kinds of stuff for hours on end. nowadays i use wood and stone. i chainsaw carve after using all the time and love it.
i wouldnt say the mj necessarily makes me creative, but it deffinetly helps. i think it straightens out my brain waves somehow kinda like a meditative state, i have a very chaotic mind. even the act of being creative without any substence helps to settle my mind, a kind of therapy. mj can enhance the experience further or easier maybe.

 

[Seek]

Sometimes I get very creative and obsessively code some psychedelicly awesome scripts. Mostly moving procedural graphics / games. But sometimes I get soo lazy when vaped. It just doesn't work on its own. You have to take your part. Become obsessed with your creative idea and then get stoned and you will get the motivation. When vaping bored, it just ends up couchlock and wasting time. Sometimes I draw like crazy when stoned. But I'm not good at making any music neither I want to make. But herb definitely makes one appreciate music more.

 

[jeffp]

This is a valuable discourse because we all travel into the same inner dimension and the question is what do we do with it when we're there and how does it enhance or impinge output. It's like fire - it can be valuable tool or a destructive force.

 

[Deadhead101]

Another thing to add: when under the influence, I am just that--under the influence. There's a Trailer Park Boys episode entitled 'Let the Liquor do the Thinking'. Well, for me the same holds true for mj. That is, when i vape I'm under the spell of the mj. I'm no longer contemplating what notes to play, I just experience the notes. I allow the mj to be my mind's engineer.

 

[ledzepploid]

I just tend to finger pick the same open chords on my acoustic over and over again in the same progression, which is the opposite of creative.

 

[steiner666]

I usually have always done things a certain way regarding herb and musical creation. I vape during the initial creation process, where you're just coming up with raw melodies, riffs, progressions, beats, intervals that sound good. I play around on the guitar/keyboard and when something sounds kinda cool i quickly record it, perfection is irrelevant at this point. if i think of another part to add on top of it i'll just switch to another track and lay it right down on it sloppily, then just continue.

Then later on i'll open the projects and listen to the parts, think about how they could be changed or rearranged to fit better possibly. this may require more vaping, but i like to approach it from a different (straight) state of mind just to see if anything is made obvious before i returned to my stoned state. But when it comes time to actually program the drum tracks and any synths and lay down better guitar tracks i usually like to do that not vaked. It's not that vaping effects my ability to play, I'm just better at navigating all the different programs and plugins i use, tediously programming the notes in and keeping things organized and overall just multitasking when i'm not vaped. I've frequently said that herb makes me awesome at focusing on one task but shit at multitasking (unless its at a very sluggish pace.

 

[WatTyler]

I enjoy playing more when I'm vaped, but I think my performance certainly suffers. As does my memory for the structure of music that I'm meant to be involved in. I sometimes "go blank". With the stuff I play you maintain a repertoire of traditional tunes which you can play from memory with other traditional musicians with little or no rehearsal, and this could run into hundreds or even thousands of tunes. The creativity comes from working with that tune and around it's structure and phrases and how it's ornamented and expressed within that framework. But you need to firmly remember those phrases and their relationship. Anyone who's listened to jigs and reels and the like will know that they all sound pretty similar to the uninitiated, but even having learned them they can be frightfully similar when I'm vaped. I'm inclined to stick the first couple of phrases from one tune with a phrase from a different tune, then followed by a second part from another tune altogether to form a chimera of a tune that people almost recognise, but get confused by. A little too creative, inadvertently. When I'm not vaped I can remember how the tunes go just fine, and don't get them muddled up.

 

[chris 71]

i dont think creativity is about remembering and reproducing. sure you can take and use things you learned for example, cords and tunes. but creativity is about being creative.
writing your own music, creating your own work whatever that work may be, is were the creative part comes in.

 

[WatTyler]

yeah maybe if you don't have a level of understanding of the type music that's being played. That's taking it at a very shallow face value. There's plenty of creativity still within a given framework of a piece of music, and it can be different to pure innovation. I can assure you that there are shit loads of creative musicians playing tunes that were not written by themselves. If you think not then you're really misunderstanding an art. Music is more than playing the notes on a page.

Is a classical performance creative? I still think so, even though this is perhaps the most specific and constrained of musical performances- the conductor still has great influence on that piece of music, and the interpretation and expression of a piece of music by a virtuosos is certainly creative, if it's any good. Otherwise it's sterile.