Oblique Strategies for Musicians: How to Use Them, and What to Pair Them With

Oblique Strategies is a small black box of cards, each with one short instruction, that Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt first published in 1975. More than fifty years later it is still on sale, and musicians still argue about it and look for something like it.

This guide covers what the deck is, why it was made, how musicians have actually used it (with sources), where it falls short, and how to pair it with concrete musical constraints so a session ends with music on disk. We touched on Eno briefly in How Electronic Artists Use Creative Constraints; this piece is about the deck itself.

What the deck is

The full title is Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas. The first edition, printed in 1975, had 113 cards in 500 numbered copies signed by Eno and Schmidt.

It grew out of two parallel habits. In 1970, Schmidt made "The Thoughts Behind the Thoughts", a box of 55 sentences printed on old prints from his studio. Eno had been writing his own working principles on cards, and named them Oblique Strategies in 1974. The two collections overlapped so much that, in late 1974, they merged them into one pack and put it on sale.

Schmidt died in 1980, and Eno kept revising the wording. One detail matters for musicians: the first three editions each came with four or five blank cards, to be filled in by the owner.

A note on copyright. The deck is a commercial product, and the fifth edition is sold by Eno's official shop at enoshop.co.uk. We quote three cards in this article, verbatim, and no more. If the idea works for you, buy the deck.

Why Eno and Schmidt made it

Eno explained the origin in a 1980 radio interview with Charles Amirkhanian on KPFA. The cards came from working situations where, in his words, "the panic of the situation" made him forget that other ways of working existed, "particularly in studios".

Under pressure, he said, you take the head-on approach because it looks like the most reliable one, and often it is not. The cards were reminders that other attitudes were available. He collected "about fifteen or twenty" before putting them on cards, and his very first one was about treating a mistake as if you had meant it.

The instruction card in the deck describes two uses: keep the whole set in mind as a range of possibilities, or draw a single card when you hit a dilemma at work. If you draw one, you trust it, even when you cannot see why it applies.

Our reading: the deck was built for the moment you are stuck inside a piece, usually with a clock running, not for starting a piece from nothing.

How musicians actually used it

Bowie and Eno in Berlin

The best-known case is David Bowie's Berlin-era albums: Low and "Heroes" (both 1977) and Lodger (1979). One correction first, because it is a common mistake: Eno did not produce them. Bowie co-produced them with Tony Visconti. Asked whether it still annoyed him that people thought Eno produced the Berlin albums, Visconti answered "Yes", and said Eno spent "an average of three weeks" on each album recording his parts.

On "Heroes", the cards were used on the instrumentals, including "V-2 Schneider", "Sense of Doubt" and "Moss Garden". "Sense of Doubt" features only Bowie and Eno. Eno, quoted in David Sheppard's biography On Some Faraway Beach: "It was like a game." They took turns adding overdubs, each obeying a card he kept secret, and the two cards turned out to be "entirely opposed to one another". Eno's pushed everything toward sameness, Bowie's toward difference.

Lodger saw more use of the cards. "Move On" was written by playing along with a backwards recording of "All the Young Dudes", and on "Boys Keep Swinging" the musicians swapped instruments. Asked whether that swap came from the cards, Visconti said: "Probably. Fortunately Carlos could play good drums." Even inside the sessions, the line between a card and a studio experiment was blurry.

Coldplay

When Eno co-produced Coldplay's Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends (2008), the band used the cards too. According to the Guardian, Eno would give each member a random card and ask them to interpret it musically while the band jammed, without telling the others what their card said.

Phoenix

Phoenix bought a deck for the sessions of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (2009), and Ear Farm reported that they used it "early and often". Then they went further. Singer Thomas Mars said he kept hoping to draw a card that would let him rest, never got it, and the band wrote their own: "we started our own cards as a joke and it worked in a way".

The skeptics

Not everyone was converted. Devo's Gerry Casale said the cards were "too Zen for us". David Byrne of Talking Heads called them "funny and sometimes useful". Carlos Alomar, Bowie's guitarist on the Berlin albums, said in 2016 that the cards hang on a wall at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where he teaches, and that he sends blocked students to them. Their first reaction, he said, is the one he had: "What the hell are you talking about?"

What the cards are good at, and what they are not

Good at:

• Interrupting panic. That is their stated job. When the session narrows to one obvious move, a card puts a second one on the table.
• Working in any genre. A few cards are about music composition; most are more general. A techno producer and a string quartet can draw the same card.
• Shaking up a group. Secret cards in a jam (Coldplay) or opposed cards in a duo ("Sense of Doubt") change how people listen to each other.
• Finding seeds. Eno, quoted by the Guardian, admitted the odds of getting a great piece this way are remote, "But the chances of you getting a seed for something are quite strong."

Less good at:

• Being understood on the spot. Interpretation is the point, but it takes time, and some people bounce off, as Alomar's students and Devo did.
• Handing you material. A card about speed does not tell you which tempo. A card about sections does not tell you which form. In our experience, facing an empty project, a general card adds a decision instead of removing one. What a musician needs then is concrete: a key, a tempo, a form, a rule about sound.

Eno himself used concrete musical rules too. On Lodger, Visconti recalls, he wrote his eight favorite chords on a blackboard, asked the rhythm section to "play something funky", and pointed at chords at random for the band to follow. "This didn't go down too well," Visconti adds. Concrete rules have their own cost: they can feel like orders. That is why we think the two kinds work best together.

Pair an oblique card with a concrete one

Keep the two jobs separate. The concrete card fixes the material: what you play. The oblique card changes the attitude: how you play it. Below, two Oblique Strategies (as listed on Wikipedia), each paired with ComposerDeck cards you can act on in the next twenty minutes, then two sets inspired by the Bowie sessions. Our card texts are quoted exactly.

"Are there sections? Consider transitions."

• 01 Form Chain Form / Medley (A-B-C-D...) Compose a piece as a series of distinct, contrasting sections that do not necessarily return. Each section leads to the next through deliberate transitions. Try: treat the loop you are stuck on as section A, sketch B and C fast, and spend the last five minutes only on the joins.
• 02 Form Ternary Form (ABA) Compose a piece in three sections, where the first section (A) returns after a contrasting middle section (B). Create a sense of departure and return. Try: make B change one thing only (key, density or groove), then bring A back with a single new element so the return sounds earned.

"Work at a different speed."

• 03 Malus Slow Motion Set your DAW to 50% tempo and compose at that speed, then set it back before you export. MIDI parts follow the tempo; recorded audio only does if it is warped or time-stretched. Try: play the hi-hats and the bass line in at half speed, by hand, then listen at full tempo before you fix anything.
• 04 Malus 30 Second Decisions You have max 30 seconds to make each creative decision. Use a timer and move on no matter what. Try: apply it to sound choice only: thirty seconds per kick, per pad, per bass patch, with a phone timer on the desk.

When the session needs an accident

These three borrow the Lodger spirit: backwards material, unfamiliar hands, first takes.

• 05 Malus Reverse Theme The main theme/melody of the track must be reversed audio. Try: bounce your melody, reverse it, keep the two bars that still sing, and write a new line over them.
• 06 Challenge Non-Dominant Hand Technique If you play an instrument, try playing a simple part or melody with your non-dominant hand. Explore the creative potential of technical limitation. Try: play the bass line with your weaker hand and keep the simpler line it forces on you.
• 07 Malus Blind Start Close your eyes, place your hands on your instrument, and record the first thing you play. Try: do it before you listen to anything from yesterday, and build the session on the first four bars.

Two players, opposite instructions

A duo version of "Sense of Doubt": one shared bed, two opposed rules, alternating overdubs.

• 08 Production Layered Textural Soundscape Create a rich soundscape using at least 3-4 distinct layered textural sounds (e.g., pads, drones, ambient noises, granular textures). Focus on depth, dimensionality, and timbral interaction. Try: this is the shared starting point. Build it together in five minutes, then split the next two cards.
• 09 Dynamics Consistent Dynamic Level for Hypnotic Effect Maintain a relatively consistent and unwavering dynamic level throughout a long section for a specific hypnotic, driving, or trance-like effect. Use dynamic consistency as an artistic choice. Try: player one keeps this card secret, and every overdub they add must keep the level steady.
• 10 Dynamics Sudden Dynamic Shift (Subito Forte/Piano) Incorporate an abrupt, unexpected change from loud (forte) to soft (piano), or vice-versa (subito changes), for dramatic effect. Use sudden contrast for emotional impact. Try: player two keeps this one secret, and every overdub must break the level somewhere. Swap turns until the timer rings.

Alternatives, and writing your own

If you are looking for an Oblique Strategies alternative, there are three honest routes.

• Write your own cards. The early editions shipped with blank cards, and Phoenix wrote theirs in the middle of an album. Write cards aimed at your own habits: the preset you always load, the tempo you always pick.
• Tribute decks. In 2025, the deck's 50th year, the Northampton Arts Lab published Ambagious Tactics, edited by Alistair Fruish: more than 120 cards from contributors including Alan Moore, Jim Jarmusch and Anna Meredith.
• A concrete music deck. That is what ComposerDeck is: genre, chord, scale, tempo, form, production and malus cards, dealt as a hand for a 20-minute session. It does not replace Eno and Schmidt's deck; it covers the other half of the job, the material. More in 25 production constraints.

A 20-minute session with both decks

1. Write the dilemma in one sentence. Our third and last quote fits here: "State the problem in words as clearly as possible." Say, "My eight-bar loop has no second section."
2. Draw a concrete hand. A key, a tempo, a form, a production rule. Or take one pair from the section above.
3. Draw one oblique card from your Oblique Strategies deck or your homemade one. Trust it even if it looks irrelevant, as the deck's own instruction card asks.
4. Set a timer for 20 minutes. No redraws, no swapping cards. More on why in the 20-minute rule.
5. Stop, bounce, write one line: what did each card change? Keep the bounce, even if you dislike it.

For a band, deal each player a different card face down before a jam, as Eno did with Coldplay. For a duo, use two opposed cards and alternate overdubs, as on "Sense of Doubt".