"In an ideal world I would like to assert that rather than mentally "copy and pasting" what I've done is deconstructed and analyzed why a certain existing music

"In an ideal world I would like to assert that rather than mentally "copy and pasting" what I've done is deconstructed and analyzed why a certain existing musical construct creates the effect it does." Well, I dunno. The limitation is that most audiences have little or no context for this kind of work. On one hand, the audience that is aware of the form usually has little tolerance for messing with the form outside of kitschy appropriations. Think about how a bluegrass band can play purple rain in their idiom, but if they replaced the upright bass with a synth their audiences would (and I say this from experience) probably not be very interested. On the other hand, the kind of audience that is okay with that kind of recontextualization usually hasn't invested a lot of time in learning event the generic conventions. Like, when I didn't know how to play cello, I didn't really appreciate how cheesy and plain most pop music was, until I tried to find some arrangements of pop music for string quartet and realized that a lot of elton john stuff arranged for string quartet is super boring musically... prior to playing cello I would have thought it was kind of cool to change contexts, now I just want to play Bach as well as I can pull it off. "Some people are incredible at recreating things they heard accurately." IME, this is a learned and not inborn, though I think intelligence helps. The combination of having to quickly apply those 'constructs' to specific music in performance help, as does expanding number of constructs.... at some point most folks musicians playing by ear just thinking some version of "okay, that's plastic jesus, melody and all, done really slow, but then the bridge is the stormy monday turn around".