Value stream mapping

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 playful period that one has with most of things I guess... Of course it ended up creating huge jams when the "complicated" and "not so fun" stuff started to kick in.

This bottleneck at the beginning also underlines a big difference between an artistic process and, say, a manufacturing one. If you own a factory and your supplier pushes too much raw material into you, you just ask them to reduce the deliveries. But inspiration really strikes when it wants to, and unlike the factory man, you cannot reject the delivery; not writing down a cool riff that came in the shower, that idea for lyrics as you were waiting the subway, feels like killing a kitten someone left at your door.  Having a pile of interesting ideas is a wonderful problem to have, but still a problem to be solved.

And lastly, again the most concerning part of this process map, what keeps me in my tracks, is the question mark at the end. I'm tired of making my music for nobody. A possible solution would be adding a couple of steps at the end and changing the product; "promotion" then, would not be promoting the recorded songs, but the recorded songs would become the promotion of a live show. At the moment, playing live is not an option for the matters explained in the previous post, but it's probably where my future state should be headed.

But what to do in the meantime? Because the map of a process doesn't show the fun and personal expression you feel as you go through it. Making music is something I need, but it takes too much effort, and I have too much respect for my craft to do these things just because...

Still giving it some thought.

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