Musician Diaries

I've been a few days without posting here, therefore infringing the standards I gave to myself when I started this blog. That's what standards are for: to help you differentiate normal from abnormal. When a transgression happens for a short moment, you can consider the occurrence an exception, and try resuming them as usual. But if the occurrence happens often, a change in those standards is in order, as I think it's the case here. It's pointless to stick stubbornly to rules that were created under different circumstances; we have to evolve as they do. As another departure from those standards, this post is for sure going to be way beyond 20 lines, as I want to dump here all the hansei I've been doing these days, and with that set the basis for the blogs' next stage. The thing about the Shewhart Cycle , as with other cyclical structure I guess, is that you can start it anywhere. I don't want to appear as if I knew what I was doing more that I ...

I  just heard the news of Nick Menza's passing away (I still can't believe I'm putting these words together). I profoundly admired his style, and I want to have a note of remembrance for him here. It's appropriate for him to appear in something called Musician Diaries, as he was a musician who played drums, not just a drummer; that only is a very rare event, in my opinion. His drumming filled the songs of ambiance and, for example, was a key element to the particular sound to 'Countdown to Extinction', the record in which I knew him; his memory, for me, will always be linked to that final earthquake in 'Ashes in your Mouth', where I learned there was another way of playing drums. Short after that, of course, there was  blast of 'Rust in Peace', perfect, precise, a piece of eternity. After him, in my view, Megadeth has had correct drummers doing their thing, but nothing close to his talent and creativity (for example, how I missed his ...

"Hansei" is a Japanese word that can be loosely translated as "reflection". As an example, some Japanese parents can tell to a boy to "go to his room and do hansei" after he has been naughty. The term has been adopted and made popular by the Lean management system. Companies do hansei. Engineers do hansei after finishing a product, or reaching (or being unable to reach) a certain goal: what went fine, what could be do better? Perhaps, although who knows if I'm stepping into cliche land here, Eastern cultures are more prone to reflection and that's why Lean has been a natural fit for them. Hansei, in the end, can be assimilated to the Study-Adjust stages of the Shewhart cycle . We can all use a little less of doing and a little more of reflecting about the done (I know I can). In fact, I have listened to several Lean practitioners already identify that as one of the main problems in our current world. There is no use in being wonderful ...

illy me, it has taken me almost 20 years to realize that the hinges of the Metal Zone pedal are screws that can be removed. Well, in my defense I'll argue that actually, that fact wasn't very important until a few years ago. The pedal started its life as a device mostly used in concerts, i.e. meant to be kicked, so there was no need to remove the structure. But as my focus of possibilities has turned more to the field of recording, pressing that huge bulky thing every time I wanted to turn distortion or on off was an absurd and dirty overkill (you can see the spring a bit in the right side picture - really resistant, lots of toil for a hand to handle). This is a classic case of the waste called Movement: motion (or effort in this case) that does not add value. If you can switch distortion on and off by pressing a little nifty button, any other strength used in excess of that is waste, energy that has a cost but does not go into the quality of the final product...

As I sorted the other day though my materials folder, for the first time in a long time, with real curiosity and fascination, a division that I was thinking about for a while finally clicked, a general but very handy rule of thumb that helps you classify the jungle. I have this folder called "motifs"; --kinda vague and badly use of the word, but the term 'speaks' to me and that's what matters--. It's the place where I put conceptual ideas for songs, stuff that is in the abstract form rather than actual recording snippets or written word. For example, let's say, I listen to a song with mandolin and synthesizers in a movie and I think "hey, I'd like to compose something with that vibe". That's just an idea for when I'm a mandolin+synthesizer mood, all I need is a reminder. Or matters that I want to expand as lyrics. So here's my aha moment: the composing stage of music creation can happen in plenty of ways, but in my ca...

The other day I started a project that is very well suit for the using of 'frozen' materials, in fact that is one of things that most attracted me of it, so happily I ventured, for the first time in a long time, into the folder that contains all my snippets, riffs, jam recordings and whatnot, and which, congruently with my current Lean efforts, is now called "materials inventory". To be more precise, for "materials" I understand any amorphous stuff that hasn't reach the demo state yet. For a long time, I've only been in that folder to drop stuff. It contains, for example, things transferred from two generations of cellphones. Traditionally I've done the transfer only when the memory is running out, so there is a big batch each time. There are also, as it is foreseeable in a musician, plenty of other recordings made in the computer, via the internal mic or a sound card, guitar, keyboards, harmonica, kazoos, a capellas... There's a...

I'm happy to declare that I've practiced the following standard list structure to a point that it has become second nature in me. I use it for music and non-music related stuff: Line 1) NAME OF THE PROCESS Line 2) INPUT: [What we have at the beginning] Lines 3 to x) [ All kind of strange crap to make things happen] Last line) OUTPUT: [What we have at the end] I intend to discuss what goes between the Input and the Output in other posts. But taking in consideration only this  high level definition, we get a world of possibilities already: as I'm running any of these processes, I often find that the beginning definitions were imprecise; every time I run the list, I learn to define the starting and result a little better, or it turns out that it made more sense to cut the 'chunk of activity' at different points... This makes the content of those lines (process name, input, and output) as movable as everything that goes within. At some point, one of these bab...

When you take the waste out of your processes, you obtain flow. If you want a crash course on flow, I haven't ever found a better example than this improvement they made in a clinic to have the next patient prepared (the relevant example starts at 4:19, but I recommend the whole video for everyone with a heart in their chest; this is the way human beings are meant to work together, the way I see it.) The critical point where a lot of waste is created, is in the process between one ill person leaving the doctor's and the next one coming in. But it's a narrow factor, upon which we can exert control. Let's have him ready, by the door. The rest of the people in the waiting room can go at their pace, no big deal. Simple, isn't it? Does your doctor do it? I can tell mine doesn't. The mechanics under this simple example can be applied to any area in our lives. For example, for any item that you have to buy periodically, have the one you're usi...

When I was getting started in the habit of flossing, I remember there was a very ugly first period. My gums bled, and, while I was at it, I sometimes noticed a disgusting scent of halitosis in my mouth, something that hadn't ever happened to me before. If I didn't know better, perhaps I would have thought it was stupid going on with that practice, which, on top everything, was gruesome and took me forever. That flossing thing must be for sure harmful; I felt much healthier before I started doing it! Obviously, it was not that I was healthier, but that before the filth was hidden. A Lean transformation is a bit like that. In the first moments can be overwhelming; problems start to emerge everywhere. But it's like that old adagio, "the first step to resolving a problem is acknowledging you have it". You are free to hide your organizational problems under the mat, but you cannot escape to the consequences of doing that. At some point, they may come and b...

With all its layers of complexity and challenges, there is a kind of waste that manufacturing and services don't have to deal with, but the artist does: personal resistance. When you work in a car manufacturing company, the final goal is having a car, and there is no second guessing about that. If you'd tell to your boss "I'm unsure if we should build a car", he'd probably suggest you politely to start looking for another job. However, in the uncertain world of art, where you work with materials come out you don't know from where, intuitions, strange urges and glimpses, and things that can sometimes be true and false at the same time, self doubt and internal resistances come with the territory. In fact, in some cases maybe they are necessary to get the project right. Sometimes you just know that a song is not there yet, or that its moment is not right, and all you can do about it is wait. Neil Young spoke of that process as 'a window that ...

One of the many stories that circulate about Toyota encompasses, in my view, what Lean is all about. Actually, more than a story, is a saying by one of its executives: "the workers in the company have two obligations. One is following the standard work. The other is improving it". Standard work is not a stiff grid where to bury your intelligence and heart. On the contrary. What the 'grid' takes care of is all that stuff that gets in the way of your creative, best work. You remove one obstacle here, other there, and one day you have accumulated hours, days, years of solving problems into a little job helper. And it looks so simple and easy to follow only because you've taken out all those 13,598 things that didn't work. One at a time. Sometimes, when I have a standard list of a process stabilized, that's accumulated that kind of wisdom for some months, as I use it I feel like there's a "warm hand" that is helping me do the work. I...

Why taking the trouble of writing stuff about how you do stuff? Isn't it a nerdy thing to do? Doesn't madness lie that way? Well yes and no. As with most of what we do, it all depends on what's the underlying motivation. Regarding this science/art of how-we-do-what-we-do, I always find healthy to remind myself that notes, To-Do lists, calendar plans and all the like, have a main motivation: getting us to the fun part as quickly as possible. Human brain has a wonderful plasticity; it quickly rearranges itself to do things completely different. We can be at one moment planting a rose and the next one trying to appease a crowd. To take full advantage of such plasticity, it's a good thing to remember that the change of activity has a cost, in terms of effort --the tiny wheels inside the brain must be replaced, the microscope lenses leave place to the telescope...- By creating guides for ourselves, we facilitate that change of dies. Those guides don't need t...

Waste (="not value") has been fought by countless warriors, who have classified it in different manners in order to develop their strategies better. As the information in the interwebs on the different kinds of waste is a plethora, I'll limit myself here to a brief explanation of each kind according to my division of choice, with an example in a "traditional" field of application, and other more music related, taken from my personal experience when possible. Transportation: taking items (raw material, work in process...) from one place to another without adding value to it. Traditional example: a piece that after being processed at station A must be taken to station B through a long corridor. Musical example: having to move a file from a folder to another when you need it in two parts of the process (for example, a list of instrument arrangements that you need during composition and later during the recording rehearsals). Inventory: any product...

Let's say you want to cook rice. To make the example easier, let's make it plain rice: just rice and boiling water. When the rice is in contact with the boiling water,it gets cooked. In other words, in that moment value is created. Everything else around that contact, (even if it is what makes that contact possible) is waste. Waste must be eliminated. Value must be enhanced. Let's play a little bit with the factors. Let's say that you live in a planet where there's no water. To get a pot of water for cooking, you have to trust in smugglers who charge astronomic prices to go to the other extreme of the galaxy. After you place your order, you have to wait 6 weeks, and hope that the guy on the mission wasn't caught in a space control. All of that is previous to the water being heated and meeting the rice. All of that is waste. Now let's say that you have a regular planet Earth kitchen with running water. In it, you have to walk eight steps to grab a p...

Behind all the dazzling tools and techniques developed in Lean, there is a common basis: the scientific method. Sorrily, thanks to the entertainment industry, the word 'scientific' evokes the image of a pedantic teenager, with presumable difficulties to get laid, dressed in white coat and doing silly things with baking soda (on that regard, it's curious how many Hollywood productions equate "scientist" to "mad scientist"). But the scientific method, in fact, is the best tool we have for the exploration of reality. To move ahead through reality and reach objectives, we have to do trial and error anyway. That trial an error can be done haphazardly, or, if you want to maximize your results, in an orderly manner. That's what the scientific method provides. The scientific method works through iterations. The most popular model to describe those iterations is the Shewhart cycle, popularly described as PDCA (Plan Do Check Act). I prefer Shewhart...

All of this looks like a lot of work in addition to everything you already have. What's the point of so much analysis? Wouldn't time and energy be better employed just firing up the DAW and going ahead into the next idea, hoping that force of habit will take us by the hand and that's all the organization required? That's for each to decide on their own. In my case, it sure pays off. The more uncertain the environment is, the more you need a system. And a music maker faces a lot of uncertainties, both external and internal. The point of so many systems and lists is not to create 'cookie cutter' solutions for songs, increasing quantity at the expense of quality. On the contrary. I want tiny, well greased machines, that take care of the boring parts of every process, so that when the moment of actual creativity is in front of me, I can give it my best shot. Modern life is often death by paper cuts. Stuff gets in your way, a bit here and a bit there, no...

All of this looks like a lot of work in addition to everything you already have. What's the point of so much analysis? Wouldn't time and energy be better employed just firing up the DAW and going ahead into the next idea, hoping that force of habit will take us by the hand and that's all the organization required? That's for each to decide on their own. In my case, it sure pays off. The more uncertain the environment is, the more you need a system. And a music maker faces a lot of uncertainties, both external and internal. The point of so many systems and lists is not to create 'cookie cutter' solutions for songs, increasing quantity at the expense of quality. On the contrary. I want tiny, well greased machines, that take care of the boring parts of every process, so that when the moment of actual creativity is in front of me, I can give it my best shot. Modern life is often death by paper cuts. Stuff gets in your way, a bit here and a bit there, no...

I probably first heard of Theory of Constraints in Mark Graban's podcast. One of his guests spoke with veneration of Dr. Goldratt's visit to their firm, where he delivered one of his last presentations short before passing away in 2011. I watched the presentation, and also watched the film adaptation of his popular business novel 'The Goal', which gives you an overview of what TOC can do for you. To give a brief overview, TOC sees reality as processes just like Lean, but its efforts are focused on finding the 'bottleneck' or 'funnel mouth' that every process has, as that is the 'weak spot' that will condition the throughput of the whole system. The funnel image comes here very handy: if you try to increase the capacity of a funnel only by pouring more water into it, all you're going to do is overflowing the funnel. Everything is useless unless you widen the mouth of the funnel. And that is true of any process; you ha...

After some time applying and tailoring the different Lean tools to the very little applied world of music making, I found myself in a situation that for me was confusing yet familiar. The confusing part was that, even though I was improving my processes day after day, and feeling the wonders and empowerment of taking more and more waste out of the equation, when you looked to the bottom line, the amount of stuff I put out there, the general swiftness of things, wasn't improving that much. Why was that? I knew I was in the right path, Lean after all is nothing but "common sense that is not that common", and once you recognize it there's no turning back; the way I see it, you're not choosing between good option and bad option, but between having an option you can now work on, or get back to the chaos you used to  live in. And yet, I still wasn't getting the desired results; there was something missing. The "familiar" part of the situation ...

What I'm writing so far is an overview of my systems; there is one big chunk missing that will finish the puzzle, but before I get into it, and without going into two much detail, I think a few words about how GTD and Lean play together could be useful. Synthetically, at bird's view: GTD provides ONE masterful process, a loop you can pass your reality through (the diagram from 2 posts ago). A David Allen's client defined GTD vividly as sort of a  'harvester': you can put any kind stuff in front of it, and you have the tranquility that you'll see it emerging at the other end, processed -- things start to happen. Lean is a philosophy that can be applied to ANY process. Including, but not limited to, the GTD loop. Following its causal chain, Lean has generated its own collection of tools and techniques to solve this or that particular problem (in fact it never stops generating new solutions, as its nature is primordially creative). But you can apply...

I'm pretty sure I remember the first time I got in contact with Lean. As a die hard GTDer, I was investigating other support productivity tools and techniques (one good thing about GTD is that it is defined at a level that allows you a lot customization), when I stumbled upon the term "Kaizen". The definition, the way I remember it was "doing things a little bit better every day". "Duh", I thought, isn't that what we, all the living creatures for that matter, intend to do? Don't we all grow and improve? So what else is new? So I moved on and didn't give it a thought for a couple of years. It was only the second time that charm came, in the form of this video: I'm convinced that the "productivity itch" some of us get is caused by an underlying intuition, almost a leap of faith in some cases, that there must be a better, more drudgery-less way of doing work. For me, this video materialized that intuition before...

I will always remember my fascination the first time I saw this diagram in 2008. I immediately dived in the GTD methodology. Looking back, I think what thrilled me so much in that first encounter was the idea that a process could be applied to my own stuff, to the things I do. This diagram kinda gave you the permission to treat what you do seriously. No one ever had done so. Processes were usually reserved for "the big things". What followed was several years of practice and discipline (and committing all kind of embarrassing errors along the way), till the GTD methodology became ingrained as my natural ways, correcting many years of bad habits. It is in also in one of David Allen's  books or articles that I learned the description of this acquisition process in 4 stages: Unconscious incompetence: you don't even know that you don't know something Conscious incompetence: you realize that you don't know something, and therefore, n...

The problem to be solved is: my capability to create music in the intangible world is way beyond my capability to take it to fruition as an objective product in "the real world". Like, in a 20,000 to 1 proportion. The transition from ideas to sounds is too slow, so the music inventory stacks up in my head. And inventory, as in any other realm, is only a source of problems. In the case of songs, it's reached the point where it's like a jungle down there. Songs that have waited for their expression way too long beyond their point of maturity, start to get bullied by the newcomers who need a riff or two and can't wait.  Two songs that weren't supposed to meet each other get mutually contaminated and there comes a point where you don't know what belongs to each. Sometimes that melange is creative; but it can easily degenerate into utter chaos; in some occasions, I get to feel that I'm committing plagiarism of songs that are not still created! ...

I will write every day about my musical activity The posts will be no longer than 20 lines as they appear in the blog's editor. If I feel that I need more than that to explore a certain matter, I'll try to be as brief as possible To avoid overcorrection, I will use the "typewriter mode": I can delete only the final "tail" of what I'm writing, but not going back. I don't want this to become an exercise of style (I cannot afford it, tbh) I don't want to generate inventory: I won't keep a list of ideas for new posts, etc. I will choose each day what I write I intend this to be an "under the radar" exercise. I will do my daily writing when I feel like it,  undocumented in my productivity systems --the great exception--. I don't want it to become yet another chore, start making tradeoffs with myself, etc No more standards by the moment. Setting too many standards too soon can stifle the process. I'll see what I...