Case Study: Transport and movement







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 sound engineer. Being a modern-musician-with-a-lot-of-roles, it is suicidal not doing it.

(The Green label connects with the SM57 cable, which I wasn't using at the moment)...

Popular posts from this blog

Iumring tq gqngiusiqns

Image
Jeffrey Liker warns that the creation of a checklist or procedure is an opportunity as good as any to make one of our brain's favorite mistakes: jumping to conclusions. I've found that to be one of my great mistakes in my  previous approach to structuring my production (strongly connected to other of my top ten weaknesses: trying to standardize too soon, before running through enough iterations just letting the process reveal itself). In a previous post I discussed how simply making conscious that all our processes have an input and an output, and making both explicit, brings in itself a great deal of clarification to any outcome we want to produce. I still believe that; I also said I would discuss what was within that "sandwich" in another occasion. My mistake was related to the way those tiny input-output boxes interact with each other. My unquestioned assumption was that I had to standardize the procedural language within them too. It just seeme
Read more

Maple Dye, "Unloved"

Maple Dye · Unloved In the peak of the pandemic, when everything was uncertain and scary, two ideas for songs came to me. Or better said, two powerful ideas that lived in me asked at some point for expression in a musical way. One idea was "we'll get out of this shit, we always do. Hopefully the humans will learn something out of this. It will be worthwhile then, even if I don't get to see it". This idea, through the proper alchemies, turned into "When We Make It Through The Storm". The other idea was "we all have to die. If I win this nutty virus lottery, then so be it. The sad part is not that I have to die, but that, if I did, right now nobody would really give a fuck..." This idea was the kernel for "Unloved". I reflected upon my life and found a lot of love had been given by me, but not so much received. My family is not the most mentally healthy and, from year zero, everything under the "love" label was generally just hid
Read more

"Crazy JS Teacher"

This song is so underproduced that it's embarrassing. This time I got the mastering volume right, but a couple of unexplainable cracks and pops sneaked in... arrgg! There was a "pit of misery" moment in there when I was twisting the knobs and thinking I hate my fucking life, so I stuck to the principle of keep it fun, and moved along. Each time I fail a bit better, my processes advance and get richer and more detailed every time, but God, I need a producer so bad, this stuff drains me, it always feels like fishing in the dark with a stick, I'd rather be doing anything else, for example music. In any case, like the other quickies I'm releasing weekly, this is good practice and dexterity; you can figure out a lot a process and do a lot of preproduction, but in the end there is a kind of knowledge that you only get by running the whole process from one extreme to the other time after time after time... The song is something I dreamt. Not
Read more