Musician Diaries

All systems go for 2019! Here is a video I enjoyed recently. Dweezil Zappa (one of the human beings more at ease in his skin that I know; always a joy to see), reminisces his guitar lessons with Steve Vai. On his turn, Vai also mentions at the end how he once took lessons from Joe Satriani. A simple yet beautiful testimony of the transmission of knowledge and beauty, as years go by... Best of wishes for everybody for the upcoming year... :)

I guess it's connatural to this season to make plans, summaries, reviews... To pause and look back for a minute before starting to move forward again. In my case, this year it's meant to start keeping a "Musical CV", in other words a chronological (as much as I can) document that contains an exhaustive (as much as I can) list of all the music I've produced, and other noteworthy events in this noisemaker vocation that has happened to be the "one thing" for me. I started the document in order to get some clarity, and I've already got some. The first surprise -expected but yet a surprise- is just facing the heap of stuff I've already worked on, been involved in, and put out there already. I guess it's also only natural that we forget about the road we've already trod upon, always focused already on reaching the next stop. Even physically, we have eyes on our forward side, and a back, which is blind, on the backwards side. The improvement wor...

No, I'm not addressing here that dual, schizophrenic, Peter Parker/Spiderman kind of life that most of worthwhile people who want to bring their "dear thing" to this world are usually forced to live, feeding the ruthless machine by day and doing the actual, memorable work by night. That's a matter for another post. What I mean by "two works" today is the way in which followers of the Lean methodology frame their work. I heard such expression in an interview with the Lean consultant Jess Orr , who used to work for Toyota -the company that is the gold standard for Lean; and by the way, could we please have soon a Toyota in healthcare, in supermarkets, a computer seller, a political party, a... etc? :) -. The two works are: 1) "Making the numbers". Units produced. Outcome. Weekly production plan. 2) Work the system. Work your processes. Improve the way you do things. In this mental model, 1 and 2 are strongly interconnected. A super...

I should perhaps feel threatened or pissed about this guy, considering that one of my songs in the making has a strong and deliberate 80s feel. But he obviously tackles the most wussified-keyboardish side of the thing, and also, I think he is great...