Road marks
A combination of cool features in my current DAW (Reaper) has allowed me to create something that looks a lot like the road signs you see while you're driving. It makes for a great experience, and also reduces mistakes and the time it takes to rehearse things. I'm loving it and I hope it lasts and I can build upon it.
The features required are:
1) enabling the option that makes the playhead stay at the center of the screen (therefore the waveforms scroll when you play the song).
2) Creating a track for empty items with text. (I've customized this one so I only need a keypress, and each annotation comes with a different, random color).
Once I've done that, I play the song and start to rehearse on top the track I want to record (in this first experience, it was a bass track). When I stumble at some point, I stop the playing (I "pull the andon"), and make a note of warning. Just as with traffic signs, to be effective, the note must be put a bit earlier, where I can read the warning with enough time to react; things like "detour ahead", "Closed curve at 200 meters", here turn into "change of tonality", "One extra bar", or abbreviations that tell me where fingers go in a certain conflictive moment...
Then I go back to the beginning and rehearse again. The session starts to scroll, I enter in state of flow and play at ease and be creative. Now and then, however, a sign "wakes me up" in the exact place and tells me where to be careful. And everything flow like in a road movie, and I love this system, and get better music done, with less effort. Wow.
The features required are:
1) enabling the option that makes the playhead stay at the center of the screen (therefore the waveforms scroll when you play the song).
2) Creating a track for empty items with text. (I've customized this one so I only need a keypress, and each annotation comes with a different, random color).
Once I've done that, I play the song and start to rehearse on top the track I want to record (in this first experience, it was a bass track). When I stumble at some point, I stop the playing (I "pull the andon"), and make a note of warning. Just as with traffic signs, to be effective, the note must be put a bit earlier, where I can read the warning with enough time to react; things like "detour ahead", "Closed curve at 200 meters", here turn into "change of tonality", "One extra bar", or abbreviations that tell me where fingers go in a certain conflictive moment...
Then I go back to the beginning and rehearse again. The session starts to scroll, I enter in state of flow and play at ease and be creative. Now and then, however, a sign "wakes me up" in the exact place and tells me where to be careful. And everything flow like in a road movie, and I love this system, and get better music done, with less effort. Wow.
