Tag Archives: Projects

Stand

Looking at getting my shit back together. I feel like the long weekend needs to come to an end; time to get busy, active, moving forward. I’m not hurting for cash at the moment, but my income will be drying up within two weeks. It’s time to make the grab at real life again.

I’ve sorta enjoyed the past 2 months of floating. It’s nice to go to bed at 4 and wake up at 11. Nice to spend hours at the cafe. Great that I have no place to be at any one particular time. However, it’s the textbook definition of being debased. There’s no ground, no foundation, no roots. I thrive when rooted; it’s why I’m not a homeless traveler, although the romanticism of that idea tempts me. I need something to churn through, some cause, some purpose greater than myself to give me reason to keep going on. When I’m by myself, on my own, the fire inside is gone, and I’m left to chew my own face. If I want to survive my mental health, I need to work.

I think it is less to do with having a job (although income is important), but rather more about being part of something. When I am alone with my projects, I get the fire for, oh, a few days, a few weeks maybe, and then it just burns out because, well, it’s just me, it’s just my own damned project, so why bother? So many of my projects die before they bear fruit, and that is the crux of it. If I had a writing partner, or a group, or if I had a fellow musician to jam with, or if I was on a team of programmers working on a project, then dammit, I think I could achieve something, finish something. So what if I don’t get the pride of having done the whole thing myself? What does that get me other than “eh, that’s cool.”

Time to stand up and walk.

The Vapor of a Runner’s Breath

Spread a little thin tonight. Finally did laundry, which I’ve been meaning to do for days but put off because 1) I hate doing laundry and 2) I’ve been feeling a little ill (just a little) all week (not sure if it’s the cedar, the weather, or just my time of the year for a cold). My problem with laundry night is that I have to change into older (read: tighter) clothing, and then devote several hours of my night to the boring, unsettling task of going to the laundromat. Chores suck. During that time, I get way too many inspirations and desires to do something else, desires that never manifest any other night. Pity, that.

While packing up my clothes and supplies, I had an inspiration, a melody, a phrase of song. Ran to my keyboard and pecked it out. Luckily, I remember a little of where I put my fingers, but the sound of the inspiration is gone. Disappeared like a vapor, like a cloud of breath on a cold day. You breathe it out, watch the cloud shift, and then it’s gone forever. Best you can hope for is to remember what it looked like.

Since I was feeling a little inspired musically, I took my drum machine with me to the laundromat. Had high intentions. The problem with hammering out a rhythm on this machine is one of mechanics: in order to record a drum track, I need to find an empty slot for the pattern and select from a dizzying range of drum kits before I can even lay down a loop that sounds something like my idea. With practice, this dance would become easier, but until then, it’s an obstacle of frustration. Most musicians develop habits and methods to move through these problems, but not me. Not yet.

It’s as though I need a studio engineer on retainer, ready whenever I am inspired to record something. In this regard, I’m jealous of the artist known as Prince, who is rumored to have his entire mansion wired for recording, and has a staff on-hand to press “record”. If only we could all have the help we need when we need it. Or our own laundry appliances.

After pecking on the drum machine, I got tired, fatigued really, and my will to thump beats dissappeared like a vapor. Eyes glazed over. Just too ill, I guess, to create my own stuff. I hate that feeling. So I pulled out “Cryptonomicon” and picked up my reading. I should’ve done that from the outset; would’ve gotten farther just focusing on one thing than timesharing between urges.

My battle in life is one of focus and attention, the fact that to actually get anywhere in my life, I need to cultivate the dogged determination to see a task through to its goal. To win by crossing the finish line in due time. A marathon is not run in chunks, with breaks for distraction; it is run by one foot in front of the other for 26.2KM, no matter how much acid builds up in your veins. It is run by determined rhythm. It is run by measured breathing. It is run until you cross the line.

Nudge

Been busy with a few projects. A few too many. I want to finish something before I start the next thing, but apparently that’s not in my cards. Would someone like to volunteer to be my goad? The pay is crap and I’ll eventually resent you, but you can take solace in being the irritant-as-muse to push me into completion.

Work on the Glass Door music site is going slowly, as expected. WordPress makes some things a breeze, but at the cost of making the system complex enough that I have to be in a particular mindset to have all the parts in my head so I can focus on making things work right and not get sidetracked.

An inspiration hit me Friday night and I had to follow through. Every now and then, I do some image work, and it’s usually inspired by something I saw somewhere. It’s like a challenge to myself to emulate the style of a poster, or simulate a visual observation with either pixels or vectors. Friday, I was inspired by looking at a movie poster and had to see if I could simulate lights on the horizon. After a few attempts, and with feedback from my friend Bart, I have a result I’m happy with. I think I’ll use this as the masthead for my music site, and build out the visual style of the site from this.

I’m getting an itch to lay my hands on my music gear again. I need to finish a track tentatively called “Less Than Three” (horrible working title, I know…I’ll figure something else out before I post it). I’d also like to flesh out a song called “Habeloff”, a syrupy, sappy little waltzy thing that I made as a 30-second snippet of a song. There’s more to the story, and I really need to flesh it out.

Last week, I finished building up a new desktop computer. Picked up a board, case, disk, and some miscellaneous hardware, assembled it, and gave it a good shakedown. The first motherboard I got didn’t cut the mustard (Asus makes flaky boards…just sayin’), but the second board, from Gigabyte, is rock-solid so far. Using a 6-core Phenom II 1055T, 8GB of ram, and 1TB disk. The fans are quiet, and I really like that. I haven’t migrated my files over to put it into use yet…I’m a slow mover when it comes to trusting new hardware. Soon, though. Soon.

As if I don’t have enough to do with my freetime, I went to the library for a book. I’ve been on a reading kick the past month and a half; so far, I’ve read Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ and “The Martian Chronicles”, H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”, and Isaac Asimov’s short story “Youth”. Not a bad haul, really. When the weather’s cold, I tend to read fiction. Anything to get me away from staring at screens. But, cocksure in my newfound ability to read quickly (these are short novels, after all), I went to the library to satisfy the reading appetite. What I found (the selection is slim at my nearby library branch) was Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”, weighing in at 900 pages. Yeah, that’s gonna take me a long while to consume. Two nights of reading, and I’m only 60 pages in. Ugh. Gluttony.

As a challenge with my friend David, I made up a TODO list and posted it here. More like a “bucket list”, which is some things I can do now, others I’d like to do, and some things I should do some time before I kick the bucket. I think it’ll be a living document, subject to change, reordering, alteration. Once I finish something, I move it to the bottom with the completed tasks. Seems to be a convenient way to remind myself that I’m not as young as I used to be, and that time moves on whether I do or not.

January continues at the steady drum beat of 7/4 time.

Backup

Bought a new UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) this weekend. The one that’s been powering my network equipment for the past 7 years crapped out on me Wednesday night. Not the first time it’s shut down unexpectedly.

Luckily, I was there to witness the shutdown this time (I was 2 minutes away from bed). A brownout made it trip, and since the battery was three years old, it just gave up. I put everything on a power strip, pulled the battery, and the next day picked up a replacement. After shoehorning it into the case, I plugged the backup into the wall and heard a distinct pop inside the case. Yes, I made the Magic Smoke. So, until I can have it looked at, my faith in the backup is gone. I returned the battery yesterday and picked up a new UPS.

Did some swapping with my other functioning UPS by installing the new one at my desk, and now my audio workstation in the bedroom has a UPS. What a relief. God forbid I’m working on a piece of music and the power goes out before I can save my changes.

Speaking of music, I picked up a decent mid-level studio mic a week ago. I’ve set it up, but I haven’t taken a chance to actually use it yet. I’m discovering how loud my walk-in closet (my makeshift isolation booth) actually is. It shares an outside wall with a busy neighborhood street. Another wall is shared with the neighbor. The third is a wet wall, so every time somebody showers, flushes, or runs a sink (which is often), the mic can pick it up. Plus the air conditioner is mere feet beyond the wall. So yeah, it’s noisy. I can find periods of relative quiet; the problem is that they’re later in the evening. And if I’m going to be singing loud enough to drown out the environment, I’ll probably be heard by the sleeping neighbors.

On second thought, they don’t give a damn about keeping quiet for me. So fuck ‘em.

The song I’ve been working on for the past two months (and now it’s starting to feel like work) is at a standstill. I’d like to say I’m taking a week-long break to chase some other projects. If I say it loud enough, I might believe it. I do enjoy doing it, elsewise I’d…stop. Hmm. Seriously though, it’s fun, but the writing part is rounding towards the end. Now it’s the recording and mixdown stage. Mixing sucks, and I suck at mixing. I think I need some skilled help. Y’know?

The problem I’m finding lately is that I’m trying to do too much by myself, and it’s setting me back. From my projects, to my hobbies, to my job, I keep attempting to keep it all hidden until it’s ready for the world, keep from having to bother anybody else with my problems. Nobody’s got my back, because I’ve not been calling for backup. And as a social creature among social creatures, that thinking is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

I’m no Atlas; I don’t have the strength to keep carrying the weight of my world. I’d like to say that I’m a pragmatist instead of an idealist, but this way of doing things confesses my highly-principled view of my life. I’m trying to prove to the world that I’ve got the skills and ability to do things on my own better than everybody else. To sneak my activities into the shadows of attention and toil away in private until viola! I bring it out into the light and everybody goes, “Ooh! Aah!” That’s bullshit thinking.

The goal is not to prove myself by doing things the right way on my own. The goal is to get the goddamn things done.

I live in a big city and work at a big company; I’m surrounded by people who are experts in their field. All I have to do is ask and navigate the crowd until I find someone willing to help. I don’t have to carry the world alone.

Two Laptops and a Microphone

Last week, I bought a microphone. Picked up a Shure SM57, a mic stand and a cable for a bill and a half. I intended to take my new toy home and immediately start playing with it, but after hooking it up, crafting a pop screen out of a bent coat hanger and a nylon stocking, giving it a test shout, and taking pictures, I kinda let it sit.

Until friday night. I’d already spent some time doing some work at the coffeeshop before I left to see a movie, so after the movie I went back to see who was there to chat with. But the people I knew were busy with their own thing. So I went home just after midnight, and something inside pulled me to my music gear. I decided I’d had enough with the “buying expensive gear and letting it collect dust” kick I’ve been on for the past year, so I turned it all on and started pecking.

It’s all babysteps at this point, but I’m learning my tools. I have Sonar loaded on a laptop with a few VSTs and effects installed. I have my outboard USB audio interface, flat-panel display, a MIDI controller, and my drum machine. And now I have my mic. So I powered it all on and started learning. Learned how to drag an mp3 into the project and lay down some vocal tracks on top. Learned that my mic really needs a preamp because it’s way too quiet for the audio interface. Learned that my interface is hissy if you turn the levels up. Learned that it’s easy enough to lay down multiple vocal takes in Sonar, and that using compressor -> light chorus -> reverb sounds incredible on vocals. Babysteps.

My ultimate goal is to hammer out this song that’s been haunting me for the past few months. I wrote a poem some time back that just spilled out into a rhythmic flow, and the more I worked on it, the more I could hear a melody, a rhythm, bassline, vocal harmonies. It’s stuck in my head, and I gotta get it out and down on track. I usually forget melodies, but this one is holding on. I’m afraid of it dropping away, but with as much mindshare as it’s taken up, I doubt it’s going away anytime soon.

I do worry about that, but I also worry about spending so much time and effort and hope and hype on this song that I don’t notice if it sounds awful until it’s too late. I’ve been told time and again to never fall in love with my own work; the lesson of Pygmalion is one that I forget often. But as long as I know and understand that I don’t have a modern music production studio, that I don’t have technical expertise, that I don’t have the years of musical experience to pull it all together with a professional radio-ready polish, and that I shouldn’t worry if it doesn’t sound like that, I should be ok. It’s only a demo; demos are important, but they’re not the final product. It’s my baby, and I should love it as I should love all my other babies, but babies grow up and move on.

Babysteps.