"If you're too focused on your work being the best thing you've ever done, you're never going to finish it."
The process behind making music and creating videos are more alike than they look. Both start with an empty project file. Both stall in the same places – the idea that won't come, the edit you can't stop fiddling with, the thing you've talked yourself out of publishing. So if you're stuck on any of that, it's worth hearing how musicians get through it.
Corals are Charlie and Sam, two friends who knew each other for years before they ever wrote a note together. They make warm, acoustic-led, quietly hopeful music, and their tracks live on Uppbeat which means there's every chance you've already scrolled past one while looking for something to put under your footage.
Uppbeat's Trends and Creative Coordinator Libs Driscoll sat down with the duo to discuss where inspiration actually comes from, how they get out of their own way, and the videos they picture while they're writing.
Inspiration is something you practice
There's a romantic idea that inspiration arrives on its own, and that the job is to be ready to create when it does. The problem is that this isn’t always the case. Libs started with the question every creative asks sooner or later.
Libs: "For both musicians and creatives in general, where would you say is the best place to source inspiration for your art?"
Charlie: "A lot of my inspiration for starting things comes purely from showing up again and again and again. If you're not actively trying, you're not just going to find it. You're not going to go on a walk through the woods and go, 'Oh, I know what to do now.' You just have to show up and try. Sometimes you'll get stuck and don’t know where to go next, and then going for that walk in the woods could be exactly what you need. But whether you're putting yourself in front of the guitar or, if you're filming something, behind a camera, you just have to–"
Sam: "Show up."
Charlie: "Yeah."
Sam: "It's a practice. Practicing writing and recording is just as important as practicing your instrument. And it sounds funny, but practicing inspiration is a really important thing too. What do you do when you go for that walk and you see something that makes you feel something? How do you harness that? What do you practically do to turn that into a song? It's different for a lot of people. I don't think there's a set way.
"And be a listener, I think. It's a hypocritical answer, because at the moment I'm not listening to a lot of music – you go in waves with that sometimes. But listening to your mates' bands, going to gigs, going down rabbit holes of music is such an important place. And just being a listener in general – going out, being open to things and having conversations with people. Inspiration comes from a variety of places."
Notice that with both answers the effort comes first and the idea follows. The walk in the woods to clear your head only works if you’re already working through an idea. In short, the most reliable way to have your next video idea is to be in the middle of making the current one.
Done is better than perfect
For any creative project, dedicating time to actually make something is half the battle. Letting the thing go once you’ve worked it through is another issue entirely, and it's the one that quietly kills lots of projects.
Sam: "Showing up and giving it a go is such an important thing. Try not to get bogged down in either imposter syndrome, which is really hard, or being a perfectionist. That can really halt a project, can't it?"
Charlie: "Completely. If you always try to create the best thing you've ever done, you'd never finish anything. And everything you do, you'll learn from what you did last time. So just keep doing the thing. The more you do it, the better you'll get, and the more fun you'll have doing it as well."
You’ll learn much more from a video you’ve worked through and shared with people than the one that sits unfinished in a folder somewhere. Over-polishing a video often costs you the thing that made it worth watching, and publishing is what tells you where to aim next.
You don’t need a perfect idea of what you’ll create
Corals write without a brief, which means they spend a lot of time imagining the videos their tracks might end up in. Libs asked what those look like and the answers got more specific, and more fun, as they went.
Libs: "How do you see creators using your music? Are there particular types of content that you feel work well with your tracks?"
Charlie: "I always imagine our music being used a lot in wedding montages. We definitely have our media tracks, but we write a lot of hopeful music – I think that's a big theme in Corals. It is emotive. I just always imagine a kind of very slow-motion, hazy summer's wedding."
Libs: "Sounds quite beautiful. Drone shots."
Sam: "Yeah, drone shots. I think the easiest thing to picture our music with is something quite natural or nature-oriented. Whether that's the reality, I don't know, because we're also quite conscious of not writing music that's too one-dimensional. We try to write things that feel hopeful, but also quite applicable to a lot of different situations. So it could be anything uplifting that people are making. Or for some of our sadder ones – which I still don't think are explicitly super sad, they've just got a bit more melancholy – I think it could work really nicely with some city footage, or anything really."
Charlie: "Sometimes it's hard to imagine. But it does come up when we're writing – we kind of joke about it. 'I can totally imagine this as a kind of outdoorsy video,' or 'maybe someone's skiing to this one,' or 'someone's building their new cabin’…'"
Sam: "Yeah. Home-building. Like a little farmstead."
Charlie: "How to dig a well."
Libs: "What are the most creative ways you've seen other people use your music?"
Charlie: "The only one I've seen was the Christmas song, and that was sort of exactly how you'd imagine it – maybe someone opening a present. I can't think of an example where I've seen it used in a way that's surprising."
The useful part is how deliberately vague they keep it. Because Corals write for a feeling rather than a scenario, their tracks stretch much further than any one category label suggests. So, as a creator searching for music, start from the mood you want your video to have rather than the genre you assume you need. The track written for a hazy summer wedding might be exactly what your city timelapse has been missing.
Bounce your ideas off someone else
Corals write together, and it shows in the way they talk; finishing each other's sentences and testing ideas out loud. Libs asked where the name came from, and the answer turned out to be less about the name than about how the two of them work.
Charlie: "We had lots of conversations about the name, and we spent a bit of time running through different ideas. We really tried to hone in on something that was evocative and really visual, but wasn't so specific that it limits what the music could be for."
Sam: "We quickly realized we were making quite natural-sounding compositions – pretty much all of our tracks feature a lot of acoustic guitar – and that definitely made us think of a woodland-y vibe. I can't specifically remember where 'Corals' came from. It might've just been one of those things where we were throwing around words and that came about.
"But that's what's so nice about having another person in the room, where you can bounce ideas off each other. We used to live together, and we'd been friends for years before we even started writing music, so we know each other very well.”
“It's nice when you can say ideas that are just brain to mouth, and you don't feel embarrassed. We'll often be laughing at the ideas we're both throwing out, because we'll go from zero to 100, straight to the most obvious, specific thing, and then work our way back to something that feels more appropriate."
Charlie: "Yeah. So when you're naming tracks, you'd be like, 'This makes me feel a bit kind of dazzling water, Mediterranean – imagine a beach in Greece.' And then you're like, 'Okay, so… Green Beach.' That's how a lot of our track names happen: throwing the net out wide with how we feel about it, and then chipping away until we've actually got a name. Maybe that's what happened with Corals. I can't remember."
Sam: "Feels about right."
Libs: "Tell you what, I want to get myself a little musical best friend."
Sam: "Writing with somebody who gets it–"
Libs: "It's such a powerful thing."
Sam: "It is amazing. We're very lucky, I think."
You don't need to be in a band or have a co-creator to bounce your ideas off – you need one person you can say a bad idea to without editing it first. Whether that's an editor, a fellow creator or a friend who'll be honest with you, being comfortable to say the obvious or dumb ideas is usually what gets you to better ones.
Show up, finish it, and bring someone with you
Spend twenty minutes with Charlie and Sam and the overlap between making videos and creating content becomes hard to miss. Whether you're showing up in front of the guitar or behind the camera, these same rules apply: inspiration is something you practice, paying attention is important, perfectionism can kill an idea, and creative peers can push you further, in a good way.
If you're stuck for your next idea, Ignace's advice on coming up with video ideas picks up where Corals leave off. And if they've convinced you to find a creative partner of your own, The Creator's Cut has some tips for collaborating with other creators.
Finally, if you want to see if their lush cinematic folk works in your next edit, explore Corals on Uppbeat. For more music with that same warm, acoustic feel, Uppbeat's indie folk soundtracks are a good place to keep exploring.
