10 Creative Insights from Brian Eno's Music Workshop

At the start of 2025, I attended a series of workshops by Brian Eno, run by the School of Song. Sharing his thoughts on creativity, studio methods, and plenty of personal anecdotes, it offered us a rare chance to hear from the master himself on a spectacular music career and a lifetime’s worth of incredible musical advice.

Here are 10 lessons I took away from the sessions — and which you can learn from, too.

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Boredom is important

“I’m almost sure that [Music for Airports] would have never happened had I not been sitting in an airport bored,” says Eno — before adding, “and [being] slightly annoyed by German disco music”.

It was perhaps a lot easier to be bored in the 1970s before the invention of the smartphone. These days, most of us spend hours avoiding being bored by scrolling through content platforms. “Consumerism is the fear of boredom embodied,” Eno goes on to explain, but we need not be afraid of boredom. The next time you wake up, don’t consume anything he suggests — not anything on your phone, not even your breakfast. Instead, see what enters your mind. “Something will appear,” he says. For Eno, that ‘something’ planted the seed for one of his best-selling albums.

Brian Eno with a guitar and synthesiser at home in the 1970s. Image: Erica Echenberg/Redferns via Getty Images

Taking things out is as important as leaving things in

Challenging yourself to remove the main hook or riff in your song might seem self-defeating, but Eno thinks this is a powerful way to open up the rest of your mix and see the potential of each part.

There are two ways it can go: By removing the most important part, you might realise that none of the other instruments are doing much at all. On the other hand, as Eno explains, it might “make you realise that the least revolutionary part is the bit that you’re hooked by”.

One thing Eno would do at the end of every recording session is to create what he called the “film mix”, that is in other words, taking the piece apart, leaving stuff out, and seeing if he could create something with the parts that were left.

Push the limits of your parameters

Eno believes that most of the truly interesting stuff happens at the outer limits. For any given parameter, he’s more interested in what happens at the “edges of controls”, than the comfortable middle range that most people stay in. After a lifetime of turning the knobs on all manner of studio gear, Eno says, “I’ve realised that the most interesting thing about controls is what happens at the extreme end of them”.

Brian Eno performing with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, conducted by Kristjan Järvi, at The Royal Festival Hall on October 30, 2023 in London, England. Image: Jim Dyson/Getty Images

Take note of what grabs your attention

Creating good music starts by knowing what you like. At a time when algorithms vie for our attention, he repeatedly stressed the need to notice our thoughts and feelings. Eno often repeated the phrase, “If I do a double take, I do a triple take.” In a production context, this means noticing when something feels off or identifying what really clicks — then asking yourself why.

Break the grid

Ignoring the gridlines in your DAW or opting for an unusual time signature are just some techniques Eno suggests for adding unpredictability to your work process.

It was something that he noticed while watching the young producer and his apprentice, Fred Again.., effortlessly navigate Logic Pro. Ignoring gridlines entirely, he would start by dropping sounds into the middle of the timeline.

“If you work in Logic and you’re not a Fred, you tend to work in straight lines,” Eno says, but what is key to Fred’s music is that he ignored the boundaries that constrained most artists and acted more like a “collage artist”, fluidly placing bits of music next to each other that completely ignored the grid.

Brian Eno at the Bestival Festival in 2006. Image: John Horsley/Avalon/Getty Images

Constraints are good

We’ve all felt the urge to buy more gear or invest in some sprawling software mega bundle, but Eno cautions against this. He believes limitations are something that drives our creative thinking and stops us from getting paralysed by endless options. “The kiss of death,” warns Eno. “Is software that says, ‘Now you can do anything.’” In the digital age, self-imposed constraints are essential, says Eno, and goes so far as to suggest ideas like banning artificial reverb from the studio, forcing yourself to write a song in 20 minutes, flipping a coin to choose your chords or limiting the number of tracks in a session.

Double the tempo

Alongside his pioneering avant-garde work, Eno has written plenty of chart toppers and produced some of the world’s most famous bands. Along the way, he’s picked up some recurring tricks that “nearly always make a song better”.

One of these tricks he calls the Klaus Dinger beat, also known as the motorik beat. Named after the drummer from Neu!, it effectively doubles the tempo of a song. While working with U2 on Beautiful Day, Eno says the song wouldn’t gel until he asked the band to try the Klaus Dinger beat. That simple repeating 4/4 beat gave the track momentum and turned it into the hit we know today.

Never delete anything

You might just find treasure in the trash, but the only guarantee you’ll come across it is if you never empty the bin. That goes for your desktop bin too. According to Eno, he never gets rid of any idea, snippet, demo, or recording, reporting that he’s got thousands of song ideas that he’s collected over the years.

Over time, a well-kept archive becomes a creative library where you can pull out a recording on any given day and pick up where you left off. “I don’t ever let anything go out of play, the point about the archive is to keep all the saucepans on the stove.”

In the case that it’s a total failure Eno will still stick to his rule, although he might leave his future self a reminder: “Sometimes I will give it a title like, ‘Possibly the shittest piece of music I’ve ever done’.”

Find music in everyday life

While living in New York, Eno found himself fascinated with American radio. He would regularly record “shock jockeys” and shouting evangelists using a boom box and a cassette tape. Comparing American radio to the BBC back home, he thought, “This is amazing to live in such a fertile, unfiltered, sonic world.”

This material eventually ended up in the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with David Byrne. As he recalls, “I had recorded this guy off the radio… he was stuttering with nerves in a kind of fervent”, that bit contrasted heavily with the host who replied rather flatly with: “Yeah, yeah yeah…”. Taking these everyday recordings to the studio Eno pieced together the funky rhythmic track called America Is Waiting.

Brian Eno (right) and David Byrne (left) in a recording studio in Mexico. Image: Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Polish the turd

“Try to polish a turd,” Eno suggests; it’s one thing you can do with a piece of music you think is completely useless. It’s an interesting take on a classic cliche.

According to Eno, what’s great about something that’s already bad is that there’s no risk you can make it any worse and this frees you to try something utterly different. These bits that don’t become a song on day one might continue to have a life in the future perhaps repurposed into a part for another song. Eno does this so often that he declares with a laugh, “I am probably one of the most prominent turd polishers in the business”.