Category Archives: thought - Page 8

Software Policy Rant

Posted by on May 2, 2011 No comments

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

There was a time when I really, really cared about how people used computers. It was a side effect of my time with Free software. The community and the ideals around the freedom to use one’s hardware in any way one chooses is intoxicating in a way that only die-hard nerds can appreciate. It feeds into that need that some nerds (me) have to be right. Technically right. The best kind of right.

The desire to spread the gospel of Free software led me to try and convince everyone and their dog to abandon the way that they work in favor of an idealistically cleaner solution. I managed to create a few converts and did my small part to help along the adoption of all things Free. To this day, I believe that there are places where Free software is the best option. But I’m not going to tell you about it.

I got serious…

Somewhere along the line, about the time my buddy El Jeffe got me hooked on OS X, something inside of me changed. The purpose of these machines was highlighted for me. I can trace it back to the first time that I used GarageBand to record a song. Upon starting up the app, I created a new project and it was ready for me to record. That was it. No entering sample rates or file types – just press the big red button and play something into the microphone. I didn’t think about using the application. I didn’t even think about the computer. Everything was reduced to the bare minimum: the task at hand and me.

For someone who tweaks hardware and software for fun, this experience in anathema. There’s never a time that thought is eliminated from the equation. We have to consider interrupts, kernel settings, available memory, and a host of things that have acronyms longer than the URLs of most web sites. To simply use the computer made no sense at all.

But it made me serious.

Without the computer to screw around with, The Work was laid bare. There were no more excuses about the bit box. All that was left was me and my ideas – or apparent lack thereof. I had cleared the table of my unnecessary motion and made room for doing what everyone is afraid of doing: getting down to The Work.

Nerdery can hide The Fear…

I was pretty badly broken down when I was in my first year at NYU. My creative well ran dry. I was a scared little fish in the biggest ocean on Earth. I couldn’t string together two phrases to save my life and it really did fell like my life depended on it. But I was a Music Technology student. There were so many gadgets and formulae in which to lose myself, I could completely ignore the elephant on the table: what are you gonna do with all of these toys?

I spent hours every day writing code. I sampled rooms for my reverb program. I made a library of sound effects. I created environments for improvisation in Max and any other program I could get my hands on. Hell, I learned Lingo in Director! I covered myself with a blanket of software and hardware in such a way as to create the illusion of getting things done.

This was unhealthy. While I learned things that I use every day, I did it at the expense of my creative work. There was nothing in this game that enhanced what I was doing and while it’s not entirely fair to say that it was an act of avoidance, there is certainly a trace of that in there. And that little seed grew to chew up all of the time I would give it. Let’s face it, every hour spent jerking around and compiling a kernel was an hour lost for The Work. How many rabbit holes did I jump down in the endless search for a way to string applications together to…um…just because I should be able to?

What’s a “Workflow”?

When one is up to all hours figuring out what modules need to be loaded for the kernel to recognize a USB device, there really isn’t a need for a way to get things done. After all, nothing is getting done. But once the non-work falls away and it becomes obvious that there are other things that can be done with the tools at hand, it’s good to find some kind of process.

This is where the Free software evangelist exits.

My experience with the Mac showed me that everything on a system should inter-operate without my dropping to the system level. Less thinking, more doing. The applications that I selected at first were based on a few features that they had and not necessarily on how well they got along with others.

It’s not obvious at first, but the thing is, it’s rare that a single piece of software will take one all the way from capturing an idea to a finished product. Many try. Most fail. There’s always something that the monolithic program doesn’t do well. And what’s missing in all of the preceding sentences, class? The implicit “for me.”

As I developed my most basic workflow, I began to understand that my right way and someone else’s right way might not match. I had to respect that. And in respecting that, my ability to say to someone that they absolutely must do something in the way that I prescribe, disappeared. The more I came to appreciate the differences between how two minds work, the less I wanted to be so full of myself as to tell someone else how to do something. Especially if that person was producing their Work.

I don’t have applications that fail…

Interesting tidbit: the number one reason that I use a MacBook Pro instead of another flavor of laptop is that the time it takes for the machine to wake up is exactly as long as it takes me to open the lid and put my fingers on the home row of the keyboard. At first, that was really, really neat. Now, it is a requirement. The difference between then and now? Kids.

I have two children. They are at the center of my life. My creative work finds its way into the cracks and fills any extra air bubbles that develop in my life. This means the 20 or even 10 minute breaks that I have are used in the pursuit of something surrounding The Work. If it takes 30 seconds for my computer to reach a usable state, that is a significant loss for me. I’m not willing to sacrifice that time. And I am not tolerant of failure. My Mac has yet to disappoint me. I open it and it works. And all of the applications that I use work. All the time.

Wait. What?

Let me say that again. All of the applications that I use, work all of the time. But how can that be? Simple. I don’t use applications that fail.

One more time?

Here is how that works. The first thing I do is make sure that I play with a new app for a while before I become dependent upon it. If it crashes or requires me to shudder reboot, then it goes away. And if I’ve paid for that application? Well, we’ll get to that in a minute.

If it works out, then I will slowly start to integrate the app into the things that I do. Hopefully, it accomplishes something so well that I don’t even know it’s there. That’s the best ending to the story. The application becomes such a seamless part of what I do that it disappears. That’s the way Logic is for me. I don’t even know that I’m using it anymore. And that’s GREAT for me. The same can be said for Scrivener. Or Notebooks on the iPhone and iPad. Or Dropbox.

I can’t stress enough that the only way that things work for me is if I am firm with the things that fail. They go away. For good. I don’t check for updates or email the developer. I don’t read forums. I don’t tweak settings or drop to the command line. It just dies. The end.

To be absolutely clear, if I paid for your software, I paid for it with the implicit understanding that it would do what you said it would do. If I didn’t try the free version first (assuming it exists) then shame on me, but if your FTP app fails to move files, well, it’s not doing what you said it would despite the really awesome interface and gnarly profile settings. I asked it to move my files and it didn’t. It goes away.

This sounds kind of harsh and to be completely honest I’m much more tolerant of Free software to this day. But regardless of the source, if it doesn’t work, it’s out. And yes, that’s very anti-community and it’s not seen as a nice way to behave by most software developers, but turn it around for a minute. If you paid for car insurance and when you got into an accident they said, “Hey, sorry about that but we can’t pay up. Maybe wait until our release next quarter?” See where I’m going?

Software is at a point now where it’s a part of most everything we do. It mediates our communication. It informs our world. It is essential to The Work. When software fails me, it wastes my time. And I can’t get any more of that so I don’t feel that I owe anyone more of my time than I’ve already wasted.

Man, no matter how I say it, it comes out harsh. Maybe that’s because the effect of failing software is pretty harsh. It’s the nature of the beast.

And speaking of support…

So at the end of this rant we come back around to how other people use software. What platform is chosen and the reasons that feed into that decision. The thing is, they aren’t my choices. You’re free to make the choice and you are free to support it.

I used to debug computers for people. I used to install operating systems and waste hours figuring out why Word wouldn’t open a document that I didn’t create for a project that wasn’t mine. I made suggestions. I lobbied for other platforms and software, but in the end, I don’t control anyone else’s decisions or workflows. So along with my desire to change the way someone works goes my desire to apply effort to repair the failures of his tools.

Does this mean I don’t help my mom with her email? Nope. I do. Because she made me and it’s in the contract. Does it mean that I don’t help my dad load his iPod? Nope. See above. But I’m certainly not going to roll into someone’s space and get sucked down the hole of “How should I do…” The world is too big. Software is too mature. People should be too savvy for that now. Many still aren’t, but that doesn’t change my stance. If you didn’t make me or my kids, no support for you.

Coda

The funny thing is that I go looking for people who do what I won’t. I love hearing people who are passionate about their software and systems. I pick up a lot of great information that way. I learn a hell of a lot from the freaks over at Mac Power Users and Back to Work but my urge to share is tempered by my desire to do The Work.

That said, my next little ditty will be all about my experimentation with the iPad as a musical device and what I have discovered over the last month or so.

Choices

Posted by on April 26, 2011 No comments

Every artist has to make tough decisions throughout the course of his career. The world isn’t what it was even fifty years ago and though the opportunities are more plentiful than ever, the restrictions we take on for a multitude of reasons remain. One of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make was about The Day Job.

It’s such a cliche now. With the death of the system of patronage that Mozart lived with through the bohemian ideal and up to the artist as a Jack Keroac style wanderer there has been a thread that is tacitly accepted: the artist will take as given that his living will come from something other than his creative work.

In the 20th century, the academy took on the arts. An artist who wanted to eat was well advised to take up teaching. The success of this, with a good deal of time in the rear-view mirror, has been limited. Not all great artists are great teachers. And not all great teachers are great artists. If the aim of a university is to educate, then it might not be served by hiring a great artist who is a poor teacher. But if the aim is something deeper, such as the prestige that comes with housing a great artist and supporting the furthering of the work and research, well, that’s an entirely different story.

The time that I was making my decision about how I would feed and clothe myself was the dot com boom. I have a knack for coding and can translate from nerd to normal and back again. These are skills that were and still are in demand. Teaching was something that I truly enjoyed, but the politics surrounding something that I loved so dearly put me off. I decided to live a more explicitly dual life. I mean that in the sense that someone who is a professor and an artist is living a dual life but it doesn’t look like it. Teaching painting and painting are two different things. Someone who spends ten hours a day teaching studio classes probably isn’t making much headway with her own work. Very few people identify that split, so let’s be clear: teaching music isn’t composing in the same way that writing software isn’t composing. But at the end of the day, one of them pays better.

I enjoy software development. It tickles a part of my brain that needs attention. I really do love the challenges that come part and parcel with the industry. It’s fun, but it’s not music. It’s not love. It’s work. And it’s work in the same way that recording commercials was work and writing music for videos was work. It does pay. And it does further my goals of creating music. But why not something else? Why not suffer for my art? I mean, where’s that Byronic ideal?

I have a family.

My wife and children are my entire world. I have no idea how I lived without them and I can’t imagine doing anything that would get in the way of them having everything that they need to be happy and healthy. Are there days when I would rather be composing than sitting at work? Sure. But there are no days that I don’t want my kids to eat. There is never a time that I don’t want to have a roof over their heads. And I never want them to worry about the basics.

So how does that work? How do I satisfy the drive that I have to do something that I honestly believe I was put on the earth to do? One hour at a time.

8 PM to 9 PM is my time. I hide in my studio and record, arrange, and compose. Do I wish I had 5 or 6 hours? Of course! But there is a world of difference in the way I look at the world when I acknowledge what I have versus what I want. So I bust my butt to do as much as I can with that hour. I think about that hour in my spare cycles. On my commute. At lunch. I prepare for it so that when I get there I am all business. I set goals. I concentrate. I focus. I get things done! Amazing things can happen in sixty minutes. And instead of lamenting it as ONLY an hour I turn it around to having a WHOLE hour! The difference is staggering. For example, I wrote two songs tonight in less than an hour.

We live in a time when people are fractured. Our lives are compartmentalized and yet there is a continuity in who and what we want to be. Listening to my gut, keeping my mind on what I need, and accepting the fact that there will always be work has created a place for my music and dreams in my very real life.

New York – Memories

Posted by on April 20, 2011 No comments

My acceptance letter to NYU’s music technology graduate program was one of the most exciting letters I have ever opened. It was a unique program. There were brilliant opportunities for anyone who wanted to get involved and hustle. I was 22 and had never been to New York City. In fact, I’d never lived outside of Ohio. I was in the very small pond that was the Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory of Music. I wrote in a journal at the time that I knew I was going to be testing myself. Looking back on it now, I had no idea what I was talking about.

I got on a train in Cleveland and got off at Penn Station. I had a guitar, a duffel bag, and a suitcase. Somehow, I got a cab and made it to my student apartment on E. 26th St. My apartment was on the 22nd floor where my bedroom, such as it was, looked out on the twin towers.

In a single day my mind was completely blown.

The classes were brilliant. My teachers were all accomplished musicians, scholars, and creators. I was surrounded by art and music. I couldn’t turn my head without seeing something that I’d never seen before. It was a complete and total sensory overload. Within a week of arriving I had scheduled my classes, started school, and found two jobs. Not bad for four days work. Of the memories that come flooding back there is one that stands out above the rest:

I completely lost my ability to write music.

In the comparative safety of my dorm room in the bedroom community outside of Cleveland, I could do almost anything. Sitting down at a baby grand piano in a practice room and pounding out page after page was almost effortless. Even if what came out was garbage, sitting down to start it was easy. Somewhere I had the confidence to know that 90% of what is done is crap and finding the 10% is where the genius of a composer lies. In short, there was no risk involved. But in the center of the world where even homeless guys playing in subways had better chops than I did, the intimidation factor killed any level of confidence I might have had.

There is a powerful energy in New York. Anyone who has spent time there can feel it. It vibrates at the frequency of the soul. Every action comes alive and there is a sense of urgency to even the simplest of tasks. The darker side of that energy is the anxiety. Making rent. Eating more than one meal a day. Being in the right place at the right time. Recognizing opportunities. Not slipping into the realm of prey (on many levels). I wasn’t ready for that – not that there is a way to prepare for it.

All of this was put into relief the first time I visited home after being in the city. I tried to sleep on the couch at my mom’s house but I couldn’t fall asleep no matter how hard I tried. At about 2 AM it dawned on me that it was too quiet. Too. Quiet. To. Sleep. I was hooked on that city buzz and hadn’t yet learned to manage it.

For a year I wrote little to nothing. It felt like so much was completely lost. But in that time, there were so many new things to cram into my head. I wrote software. I learned to create things for the web – the 1995 web. Ya know, before The Web. I met people and listened to music I had never heard before. I read voraciously. After all, what’s cheaper than the library? I lived my life on the streets wandering from gallery to shop to museum to library to concert and back again. I played the part of the tourist on some days and the hardened city dweller on others. I was too poor for the subway so I saw everything on foot. My mind expanded and my world got so much larger.

If I hadn’t gone to NYU I certainly wouldn’t be sitting where I am today. There’s no path to my wife and kids that doesn’t pass through the city. And I don’t think I could have gone to the city at that time without a reason like school to support the effort. I didn’t have the courage for that. It’s impossible to measure what I gained by spending those years there. My work was influenced by people like Robert Rowe and Mark Coniglio in profound ways. Thinking about it excites whatever creative gland in my brain isn’t completely sleep deprived in these early new baby days.

New York City changes a person in a fundamental way. I don’t know how it works when one is older, but at the age of 22 it was like tossing whatever vision I had of myself into a blender and walking away a very different person. I think about my buddy Kevlar who has done essentially the same thing but without the motivation of school and I’m alternately extremely proud and mildly jealous. Experiences like that can’t be recaptured and the effect on one’s work is profound.

Sadly, I haven’t been back since I left in my buddy Chip’s purple truck heading west to Ohio and then on to Minnesota. I was fried when we emerged on the other side of the tunnel. I couldn’t live there anymore, but a good part of me never really left.

Beginning Composition

Posted by on April 13, 2011 No comments

There has to be something about playing the guitar that brings on a unique state of mind. It cries out for improvisation. It can be rhythmic and driving or melodic and wandering. Not to be a jerk about it, but I never saw anyone improvise on an oboe (not to pick on the oboe, mind you) the way I’ve seen people strum at a guitar. And maybe that’s the key. The guitar is a very democratic instrument. It welcomes all comers. In a couple of days almost anyone can learn three chords. Add in some truth and we get Bob Dylan, right? The point is that it’s a short leap from playing other people’s songs on the guitar to writing original tunes.

I remember when the light bulb went on for me. I was learning “Every Breath You Take” by The Police. I took the picking pattern (which is pure genius) and tried it with some different chords. It sounded cool. But the patterns wasn’t easy, so I changed it up. After an hour or so I had something that could be considered for the category of “song.”

Now I have no idea how the tune actually went but I can bet on the fact that it was in the key of E minor and that somewhere it had a B7 in it. I know that last part because I played it for my guitar teacher and he told me that I’d stumbled onto one of the oldest “rules” of music. Rules? There were rules?

He pulled out some staff paper and started to sketch some triads. He explained some of the basic terms. By the end of 10 minutes, I had I – IV – V – I memorized. I had now unlocked “Wild Thing”, “Louie, Louie”, and most folk and rock tunes. When he added vi I was on fire. The 50s were mine!

When I found out that there were rules for putting these things in order and that Beethoven wasn’t just a master of great ideas but a master of the framework of Western Music ™ I was floored. A huge door was now open and I was staring into the bright light of day.

All of this played into my mother’s plan of training me on the classical guitar quite nicely. The etudes of Fernando Sor became very important to me. I analyzed them (before I knew that I was doing analysis) and tried to recreate them. I dabbled in variations. I made a lot of noise and maybe a little music once in a while. But I practiced and studied them incessantly. Odd stuff for a 13 year old boy to be doing.

The thing about writing music and being a “composer” that set in early was the many toothed beast. Yes, the piano. For a while I honestly didn’t think that I could be a composer without learning to play the piano. Fortunately, my laziness and complete lack of affinity for the instrument changed that. I couldn’t do squat at a keyboard (still can’t) so I made a go of it with paper, my guitar, and my mind’s ear. I lost the fear that I would never do anything of worth because I didn’t play the piano and pushed myself along under the tutelage of my superior teacher.

The rules came slowly to me. Wanting to break or ignore them did not. By the time I got to conservatory I didn’t much care for the idea of learning more rules and practicing them ad nauseum. I was a trial for my theory teachers. I still enjoy the sound of parallel fifths (suck it!) in my chorales. But I had the rules drilled into me and when I broke them I knew it and could point to it. A student that can accomplish that has a place to start.

Once the fire was lit, it was hard to control. Many late nights from that first guitar lesson until I had kids were spent staring at a piece of staff paper or working something out with a piece of notation software. And in those moments when my mind is absorbed in the phrase at hand, there really is nothing better. It’s like most creative endeavors. The state of flow becomes as much a goal as the final product. Being in the moment. Loving the work. Waiting for that moment when the ink is dry and the next sheet of blank paper is put on the table. The beauty of a never ending process.

It’s fun to look back at how it all started. The kernel of so many life decisions held up for inspection. And the wonder that it still drives so much of my thinking. It’s still so present. I’ve been through three lifetimes since I figured out that B7 to Em change. There are so many ways to make music now that didn’t exist then and my excitement for creating has only increased over time.

When this weird tear I’m on is done running its course I’m going to have some things to say about tools. I swore I wouldn’t write about software ever again because it always turns into something ugly for me, but I have a new toy and it has changed the way I create in such a positive way that it’s impossible not to share. More on that soon.

Musical Computers Again

Posted by on April 8, 2011 2 comments

The topic of computers and technology doesn’t ever really leave me alone. It’s what I do and as a result I tend to think about bit boxes and what they can and cannot do to make life easier. They figure in quite prominently in my musical growth and I can’t really discuss all of the things that I have done musically without a little more depth in my analysis.

When I was in graduate school at NYU, I was introduced to a piece of software called MAX. It’s named after Max Matthews and is an environment for musical software development. When I first met the software in 1995 it was still mainly MIDI. As chips got faster and Moore’s law continued to be the rule digital audio and DSP became a key component. But MAX required a Mac and money. I had neither.

And then Miller Puckette got a grant from Intel and made Pure Data. Dr. Puckette was MAX’s father. He’s a freakin’ genius and a huge influence on my thinking. Definitely a god in the pantheon of computer music. His new software ran on this weird Linux thing. So I turned my machine into a dual boot debacle with Red Hat. The pain was severe, so I switched to Debian. I fell in love with all of the things I could do!

There was so much great software. So many tools and utilities for making weird noises. Most of them didn’t work together very well. Almost all of them required different libraries or kernel modules. And all of them took time to learn and master. But I loved every minute of it. Problem solving is an addiction of mine and Free Software fed it. There was always another news group to follow. Another list to read. Another module to compile. So much fiddling and playing that felt like I was doing my work. The ideology of the Free Software community made it feel like what I was doing was really, really important. And it was.

After a while, I decided that I wanted a laptop. I settled on an Apple PowerBook because I knew what was in it. No guessing about commodity parts or weird chipsets. Besides, people had gotten Debian to run on them so I took the plunge. I made it a dual boot with OS X so that I could use things like the wifi chip that didn’t have open source drivers. That should have been a clue. I got everything running but then something happened that I didn’t expect: I couldn’t make it sleep. There was no support in the kernel for sleep. So I had to shut down my laptop every time I closed it or it would chew up battery. One day, I booted back into OS X so I could close the lid. 35 days later I checked my uptime. I’d been in OS X for 35 days.

35 days is a really long time.

It was enough time to learn something about myself. In those 35 days I produced more music than I had in the previous year. All of that work tuning my kernel and apt-getting this and ./configure -ing that hadn’t made any music. It was fun, but it wasn’t The Work. My entire world changed. I understood that the tool wasn’t the important part. The Work was the end.

Since then, I have added two kids to my life. I have added a painful commute. I have subtracted the time that I used to have available to me for fiddling. To balance the equation, I have substituted money for time. And my rule for tools is simpler. Here it is:

If it fails, it doesn’t stay.

This goes for hardware and software. If a piece of hardware fails, it simply goes away. I fired my MacBook after Logic crashed 3 times and lost a great recording (yes, I overloaded the poor beast and replaced it with a MacBook Pro immediately). My wife loves the hand-me-down, but it had to leave me. And the software I use gets fired regularly. If an app fails to launch on my iDevice? It just goes away. No, I won’t send the developer feedback. I paid for something that claims to work, not to be a tester. Does that make me a jerk? No. It makes me a customer. There is a difference.

My tool chain has no room for failure because I don’t have time for failure. There is no luxurious fiddling and messing around. I open a device, launch a program, and work.

It makes me sad that I had to leave the world I enjoyed so dearly. But ideology and money are not as important to me as time. It took me a long time to learn that, but boy am I glad I took the trip.