Captain's log #44
I have to become better at finishing. The muse I serve is cruel, the
road is paved with the bodies of my predecessors. Suicided, OD'd... and
all they thought they could handle it, and they all thought they knew
better. As long as I don't put stuff out there and call it "finished",
there is a terrible psychic tension within me. So the way I see it, the
options I have are: either getting better at finishing, or calling the
whole thing off, which in my case is not possible--being able to create
music is such a blessing in my life, where would I be without it?
I feel dirty for the things I had to do yesterday to make the rhythm guitar sound decent. Still this shitty affair with the guitar emulation that sounds well while playing but harsh and horrible when listening to the recording later. Aaaarggg!!! Anyways, at least it's done.
Today, faced with the grim perspective of doing comping work (which is just another name for "office work"), I think I've found the "economy of work" I was looking for in the latest days. It is simple, with the simplicity you get when you've taken away all the unnecessary. Maybe I'm still under the natural high of the discovery, but I think there's something good here.
The quickest way to phrase it is "a child guards the entry". My music production from now on is going to be as follows: 1) I'll have fun. 2) Once a reasonable amount of fun is satisfied, then I'll move to all the other stuff, the one that only feels good "having done".
That's what I have done today and it's worked very well. Thinking of the "thingy" I want to publish this month, I found the playlist needed some more toughness in the mix. So I've gone through my files looking for something not too complicated to record. I've ended up with 3 candidates. One discarded for being more heavy-thrash than punk (putting it in such a short selection would make for a confusing whole, I think). The other was punk but had a tempo change; I think I could pull it off but it's risky (I always think I can pull it off). The third candidate was ideal, short and rude and stupid...
I've applied pretty much the same workflow I used in the previous song (see the hour-by-hour report of a few days ago), and recorded a "live" demo with voice+distorted guitar played at the same time. One of the best investments of my time ever was changing the dull beep beep of the metronome for drum sounds. It's like a little crappy Fisher Price's live concert.
I've had a ball recording this thing, then I've turned to the child and asked him "are you happy, have you had enough fun yet?" And the child has said yes, so then I've moved to the comping of "Empty roads" and done it keenly and with great proficiency.
I'm going to apply this same technique, and ask the same question, in any of my musical sessions. I'll take it from there. And in the days when there's only time for one thing, it's going to go to the child.
Today is the end of the new deadline I set for these logs. They obviously make me good, and I'm afraid to quit them, but now I'd like to experiment with writing them privately. I don't know how much of the benefit comes from turning the daily amorphous toils into a narrative, and how much is the unconscious notion of some kind of "audience" out there, making what I do "important". I would hate to turn this into a "soap opera", an end in itself instead of a means to an end.
So I'm going to move these logs to a private format for a few days at least and see how it goes. If there's actually someone who is not a robot out there reading this stuff (the site metrics are extremely modest, although I can say I already have more followers than Jesus did in life), firstly I apologize for all the crap that unavoidably intertwines whenever you try to break the silence; the thing with writing a diary is that you write every day, not only on the good days. I hope you've found something of interest among this mishmash of things, or at least had a laugh or two. If you haven't died of boredom yet, next week I'm going to be releasing a few music-related texts I accumulated last summer, so you can look forward to them...
I feel dirty for the things I had to do yesterday to make the rhythm guitar sound decent. Still this shitty affair with the guitar emulation that sounds well while playing but harsh and horrible when listening to the recording later. Aaaarggg!!! Anyways, at least it's done.
Today, faced with the grim perspective of doing comping work (which is just another name for "office work"), I think I've found the "economy of work" I was looking for in the latest days. It is simple, with the simplicity you get when you've taken away all the unnecessary. Maybe I'm still under the natural high of the discovery, but I think there's something good here.
The quickest way to phrase it is "a child guards the entry". My music production from now on is going to be as follows: 1) I'll have fun. 2) Once a reasonable amount of fun is satisfied, then I'll move to all the other stuff, the one that only feels good "having done".
That's what I have done today and it's worked very well. Thinking of the "thingy" I want to publish this month, I found the playlist needed some more toughness in the mix. So I've gone through my files looking for something not too complicated to record. I've ended up with 3 candidates. One discarded for being more heavy-thrash than punk (putting it in such a short selection would make for a confusing whole, I think). The other was punk but had a tempo change; I think I could pull it off but it's risky (I always think I can pull it off). The third candidate was ideal, short and rude and stupid...
I've applied pretty much the same workflow I used in the previous song (see the hour-by-hour report of a few days ago), and recorded a "live" demo with voice+distorted guitar played at the same time. One of the best investments of my time ever was changing the dull beep beep of the metronome for drum sounds. It's like a little crappy Fisher Price's live concert.
I've had a ball recording this thing, then I've turned to the child and asked him "are you happy, have you had enough fun yet?" And the child has said yes, so then I've moved to the comping of "Empty roads" and done it keenly and with great proficiency.
I'm going to apply this same technique, and ask the same question, in any of my musical sessions. I'll take it from there. And in the days when there's only time for one thing, it's going to go to the child.
Today is the end of the new deadline I set for these logs. They obviously make me good, and I'm afraid to quit them, but now I'd like to experiment with writing them privately. I don't know how much of the benefit comes from turning the daily amorphous toils into a narrative, and how much is the unconscious notion of some kind of "audience" out there, making what I do "important". I would hate to turn this into a "soap opera", an end in itself instead of a means to an end.
So I'm going to move these logs to a private format for a few days at least and see how it goes. If there's actually someone who is not a robot out there reading this stuff (the site metrics are extremely modest, although I can say I already have more followers than Jesus did in life), firstly I apologize for all the crap that unavoidably intertwines whenever you try to break the silence; the thing with writing a diary is that you write every day, not only on the good days. I hope you've found something of interest among this mishmash of things, or at least had a laugh or two. If you haven't died of boredom yet, next week I'm going to be releasing a few music-related texts I accumulated last summer, so you can look forward to them...
