Why Composers Freeze at Bar 5 - And How To Fix It

I even did a video on that subject, and I hope you enjoy it.

When you think the problem is creative, you start to doubt yourself, and you wonder if you have enough ideas, enough talent, or enough whatever-it-is that "real" composers have. But the freeze at bar five usually has nothing to do with talent. It happens because you're trying to do two completely different jobs at the same time: you're trying to come up with raw material and shape it into finished music in the same breath. And those are two different modes of thinking. That's why they fight each other.

Now that we have become aware of the problem, let's work on a solution. The quick fix I suggest is to simply separate them from each other. That's what I do, and it has helped me a ton. But there's more to it, so let's dive in.

Stage 1: Gathering

If gathering material doesn’t come naturally to you, I want to suggest a simple framework you can try:

1. It starts with seed material, that’s your initial input. That can be a melody or a vertical structure (a chord, or just a stack of notes).
   
   
2. Next come observations. This is where interval thinking enters. Instead of looking at your idea in strict diatonic terms, calling something a "C major triad," you look at the intervals, the numbers, the distances between the notes. Naming everything diatonically locks your idea inside the diatonic world and quietly limits where it can go. When you focus on chromatic distance instead, the same idea suddenly has far more room to move.
   
   
3. The next step is to apply techniques. To me, this is the fun part, and we can use composition techniques that take your seed and turn it into something new while keeping it connected to the original. The more you work this way, the more of these tools you collect, and the more options you have for any given idea.
   
   
4. Finally, your emotional adjustments. A technique is just a tool, and it won’t always hand you exactly what you imagined, and that’s fine. You shape the result, nudge it, and adjust until it feels right. So, the tools get us pretty far, but in the end, we always enjoy the freedom to change things by ear.

The result coming out of step 4 can now be used as a new seed, and that loop is what keeps a session moving. There’s always a next step, so you never end up frozen at the blank page, wondering what to do.

Stage 2: Sketching

This is where the music starts to move and transforms into a story. You take that little seed and ask what it wants to do. What's the emotion you want the audience to feel, and what can a possible orchestration look like? If you can imagine some ideas for the orchestration already, write them down in the sketch so you don't have to remember them.

In the video example below, a single idea is already coming to life nicely. That's my sketch and none of the interpretations in text existed in the gathering stage, but it grew out of just a few ideas I decided to trust.

Here's why that works for me: when you're sketching, you're not staring at the blank page anymore. You already have something in your hands to work with (the gathering, to be exact), and that's a much easier job now, and it's also more fun.

They Feed Into Each Other

Now, I split the gathering and sketching into two stages so I can see both clearly side by side, but in real work, they're not 100% separated. In fact, they bleed into each other and work hand in hand.

You sketch and develop the story, and suddenly, a new seed appears, so you put it down in the gathering and explore it a bit more. Then you go back to the sketching, and whenever you feel that you need more material to tell a compelling story, you already have enough related material to pull from. The key is not to force the switch, but let it happen naturally. You stay loose enough to move between collecting musical ideas and building as the music asks for it.

What you're really avoiding is the trap of trying to do both at full intensity in the same instant. That's the thing that freezes you at bar five, and you want to stay out of that trap. So, I suggest to separate them in your mind, and the pressure drops.

Why This Matters

I've been teaching Interval Theory to composers since 2015, and I keep coming back to the same point. The composers who get stuck are almost never short on ideas, but they don't have a solid workflow. In their education, they've almost never been shown how to separate gathering from sketching, so they try to do both at once and burn out quickly.

Out of experience, I can say that once somebody starts to apply those two phases separately, the whole approach to composing music changes (to the better, of course). And the most essential point being that one stops judging ideas before they've had a chance to grow. Imagine George Lucas would have said that Luke Skywalker isn't a character worth telling about ... well ...

Sometimes, you simply need to give an idea some time to open up to you, and composing will start to feel like exploration again. That's exactly what the gathering/sketching method gives me, and hopefully, this will help you, too.

Let's look at a possible sketch next that can come out of the gathering I showed earlier.

You can see my text notes in the piano score that help me remember certain emotions and storypoints, like "maybe a pedal tone in the high strings," or "light woodwinds." That's gathering and sketching living side by side on the same page. 

And that process clears the way for the orchestration. At least, half of the work is already done before you look at the big score paper.

And now, let's listen to the orchestral result. I followed my sketch and expanded it to a full arrangement. I'm feeling very lucky to be surrounded by other professionals for long enough to say with confidence that this is how I've observed many pro composers write. Usually, they don't sit down and produce a finished page of music from nothing; it's a stepwise process. Small ideas at first, then deciding which ones to keep, and finally, letting the piece grow one move at a time.

So again, this all came out of a couple of small ideas I decided to trust, and that's why the gathering and sketching are important steps you don't want to skip.

Try This Next Time You Freeze

Next time you hit bar five and the cursor starts blinking at you, don't push harder. Instead, step back and get more clarity on which job you're actually working on right now. You can even consult your music memory and try to "hear the next segment" before you write it.

If you're out of material, stop sketching and go to the gathering to collect some more ideas with no pressure to use them. And if you already have enough material you like, jump into the sketching. Just pull them apart, and the music starts moving again: first gather, then sketch, and let them feed each other.