Musician Diaries

I know too well the risks of overproduction for a musician (and for other artistic enterprises), so I'm comfortable with this being uncomfortable about not knowing where to flow. The song is stuck, waiting for vocals already composed and rehearsed to be recorded. But everything in me resists to putting a new song in the world before being able to give it a more proper "home". As a musician, I've learned to listen to and obey that kind of intuitions. As i always mention in this blog, my guild has an outrageous "job hazard" death rate. Only actors are more fucked up in my view. That is, of course, unless you play it safe. In that case you'll have a nice life and easy digestion, and will produce regularly pieces of neat crap. But I think a musician should not be a manufacturer. A few possibilities I'm thinking of, still in a scramble, are: focusing on finding an ally, and move from there to create a band adding one person at a time. Playing

Not having much to report today, I thought I'd beautify and put in a "factory like" format the current state of my process I described in the previous post. Additional inventory triangles have been added for emphasis, in the parts of the process where they pile up more outrageously... Mostly at the beginning: lots of recordings in all kind of format and devices, riffs, notes, fragments of lyrics, poems that will be lyrics, more recordings, pentagrams, half baked songs... And then demos, one track recordings that can be listened to beginning to end, waiting only for that additional 10-15% that usually comes in my case as I flesh things out. I have to say this state of affairs in itself is an advance from my process in, say 2010, when I was just discovering the magic of real time audio processing, and had a lot of daw sessions in the making at the same time...  the temptation of hearing my ideas polyphonicaly for the first time was hard to resist; that first

I have a song in the works and I'm stuck, which is not a very comfortable state to be. I'm facing a problem I've faced several times before, hopefully failing a bit better each time. My process for value creation, i.e. to convert the "voices in my head" into something worthwhile for another human being, is currently as it follows: Composition Preparation for recording Recording Production "Packaging" Legal protection Distribution Promotion I have recorded stuff before. I can go through the movements. But there is the shadow of lack of purpose at the end, lurking through the whole process. When you are a home recordist, the final step, distribution, is confusing and disheartening. You are limited to post your song in some obscure website (Bandcamp, Soundcloud), and be happy with the possibility that somebody could listen to it eventually. Feels like a guy with a thrash can and a smile telling you "Oh, another finished song! Please

hey are a bit of evil twins those two: in Transport you move equipment or materials without creating value, and in Movement you move yourself without creating value. Egregious example that combines both in the musician world is when you carry a cable from one place to another, hoping that you'll be choosing the right plug for it, otherwise rinse and repeat, with no value created in all that mess except perhaps for your psychiatrist. The solution, as with most of things in Lean, is simple and straightforward: color code! No more looking for the right entry, no more lottery when you have two identical jacks and don't know which one to plug. No more bending yourself over the holes to find the exact place where the cable goes. Better save that energy to feed the expressiveness in front of the mic, the guitar or whatever your weapon of choice is. This kind of continuous improvement would be the intelligent thing to do even if your only role were roadie or so