systems thinking
on what making music teaches you about making anything
When I started Open Studio, I was trying to build a container for my music and writing—a place to share tools, pose questions, and stay accountable to the creative process. It was also an experiment in audience building: a place for my creative work to land in context and, hopefully, be better understood.
After 22 newsletter issues, the project has taken on a shape I didn’t fully anticipate. What I’ve been building, without quite naming it, is a framework for thinking—not just about music, but about what it means to shape a creative life at all.
What emerged was more field journal than portfolio. A recursive practice. A lightly public space to think through how meaning moves, how sound transmits feeling, how systems hold space for expression—or collapse under the weight of their own expectations.
Open Studio became less a chronicle of completed work, and more a study of conditions.
What supports creative momentum? What derails it? How do you build something like a sustainable rhythm—especially when the work is speculative, unpaid, vulnerable, or just a little too weird to surrender to “the algorithm”?
Over time, patterns surfaced.
Five Lessons
To make music consistently, I had to build systems—not as constraints, but as forms of care.
I had to think about time, friction, repetition, and meaning as compositional materials—not just aesthetic ones, but infrastructural.
And slowly, I began to see that these systems weren’t confined to the studio.
They apply, almost uncannily, to everything else:
Creative work requires structure—not in the rigid sense, but in the sense that water requires a vessel.
Input is generative. Listening, collecting, and noticing are not detours from the work—they are the work.
Perfectionism is not precision. It's often just avoidance with better branding.
Repetition reveals intention. The more loops you run, the clearer your patterns become.
Systems don’t stifle spontaneity. They stage it. They make space for the unexpected by reducing the friction of the expected.
These aren’t just maxims I read somewhere. They’re working observations—revised in the field and updated with use.
Systems Evolve
Much of what I now understand about creative process has come from trying to design tools to support it.
The earliest version was a simple Ableton session template—a structural frame to make it easier to get started, stay organized, and keep moving. That became the foundation for Ableton Foundations, a beginner course focused on workflow and clarity. This was a simple primer for composition, arrangement and mixing in Ableton, meant for those who find online tutorial culture inadequate, exhausting, or too distracting. From there, I created 3 Hour Producer, a small digital book and time management system for working in focused creative blocks.
That resource is now evolving into Making Time, a more ambitious field guide for finishing music—still in progress, taking shape steadily.
Each tool emerged in response to a real tension: a friction point, a loop that wouldn’t close, a step in the process where energy fell out. Each one taught me something about how people actually work—and what they need to keep going.
But the more tools I built, the more I found myself asking: Where is the reader coming from? What do they need at this stage? What would be most helpful right now?
This new offering—creative advising—isn’t just a way to respond more personally. It’s also a way to listen better. To keep learning how creative blocks form, and how real systems help people move through them.
The Reflective Surface
This became especially clear in a recent conversation with my friend Homer, who called to talk through an obstacle he was experiencing with his skate video work. Our call unfolded like a loose collaboration. He named a friction point; I asked a question. I offered a possible reframing; he clarified where it landed flat. I asked more questions, gave more suggestions. We went on like this—looping, revising, rephrasing—until the blockage thinned out and next steps became visible.
This kind of exchange has become familiar. I’ve had versions of it with musicians, artists, writers, educators, even friends launching newsletters or designing courses. They don’t come to me for answers, exactly. They come for structure, reflection, and a space to process.
And what I offer in those moments isn’t instruction. It’s not mentorship. It’s something quieter and more lateral—like serving as a reflective surface, or a thinking partner. Someone who can mirror the logic of a project back to its maker, offering just enough perspective to illuminate what’s already there.
Homer, in his own moment of reflection, suggested I try to formalize this process and offer it as a service to others.
Creative Advising
So I’m beginning to offer something I’m calling creative advising—a lightly structured way to think through your creative work with me. It’s not therapy. It’s not prescriptive coaching. It’s a space to clarify what you’re making, why it matters, and what’s getting in the way.
It’s for:
Artists navigating second-project paralysis
Writers trying to reconcile form with frequency
Musicians with scattered demos and no finish line
Educators designing new programs
Anyone trying to build something meaningful under imperfect conditions
I don’t think of myself as an expert in how people should work but I do think I’m good at helping people articulate how they already do—and how that might be shaped more deliberately.
I’m drawn here by the kind of education that bell hooks described as “the practice of freedom.” Not accumulation, but orientation. Not instruction, but participation. The goal isn’t mastery—it’s movement. That’s the kind of work I’m interested in doing more of.
Open to Advice
Soon, I’ll be launching a system for discovery calls, and then a way to book time with me to help vision and map your creative project. For now, I’m going starting an advice column as part of this letter!
If you’re facing a creative question—practical, philosophical, or somewhere in between—you’re invited to write in. I’ll respond to selected prompts in a new thread of mini-essays, published occasionally and with care. You can be named or anonymous. Raw questions welcome. Just reply directly to this email.
I don’t believe in universal systems. But I do believe in situated ones—frameworks tailored to the particularities of your time, your temperament, your medium. And sometimes, you need someone else in the room—not to tell you what to do, but to reflect what’s already in motion. To ask better questions. To help you see the invisible shape of what you’re already building.
If that feels like something you could use right now, I’d love to hear from you.
This one resonated! Good stuff Bodhi