No Fear Here

Posted by on May 23, 2011 No comments

Fear is a topic that is floating around the blogs of a number of people that I respect. Fear of doing The Work. Fear of success. Fear of the unknown. What I find interesting about that is the climate that it creates. If enough people are talking about the fear then that means that a significant number are feeling it. And that’s the precursor to great things.

I’m ignoring my fear. In reframing my work and my outlook on life, in some simple and not so simple ways, I’ve decided that the only thing to fear is rejection. If you choose your audience carefully, there is a lot less risk.

What does that mean?

It means that I’m really only interested in about 200 people. Most of my collections of songs have been downloaded by 200 unique persons. Or to 200 unique devices. It’s pretty consistent so that tells me that there are some folks who actually care about or enjoy what I do. That’s my audience and they are the ones that I need to please. Bringing it down to 200 from, you know, THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE INTERNET seems to take the edge off.

Besides, I don’t have time to deal with fear. My only real fear now is not getting The Work done. I have two projects right now that can’t die. That’s about all that I can juggle and I’m not doing a fantastic job of it yet. Still, they are alive and well. As long as there is meaningful motion, the is room for great things.

Managing My Expectations

Posted by on May 18, 2011 No comments

Having a little writing project is fun. It’s keeping me busy and satisfied with myself as we work our way through the early months of my daughter’s life. My wife and I have worked out a schedule where she gets two nights a week to do what she wants to do and I get two nights. It’s far from ideal, but something that I’m learning (again) is that the less time I have to do my work, the better and more productive the time I spend on it is.

That makes no sense at all. But maybe it does. I think about music all day long. I have a non-stop stream of melodies, harmonies, and rhythms in my head. I whistle and hum when I’m alone. Stupid things like harmonizing with the drone of my tires on the road or whistling against the sound of the air conditioning. It passes the time and feeds that place in my subconscious where the good ideas start.

This constant thinking about the thing that I love doing also makes that little time that I have more precious. I go into the studio tired and worn down from my day but then I accomplish something, even something small, and I come out feeling like a million bucks. It’s great! And when I’m in the sketching stage of a project, this kind of schedule is perfect. It would be hell if I were trying to get a tune down for release. For that, I need concentrated stretches and many nights in a row to get something consistent. So it looks like I’ll be sketching for another month or so. Works for my family, so it works for me.

The other thing that I have going for me is the Korg iMS-20 app for my iPad. Wow. Tons of analog synth goodness with the added beauty of the Korg Kaos pad. That right there is worth the price of admissions. I find myself sitting in the coffee shop or wherever just noodling away with different timbres. Moving patch cables around with no rhyme or reason. It’s the sonic equivalent of doodling – something that the iPad does very well. It’s a shame you can’t create with that device. It’d be neat. Oh. Wait.

So with my reduced time, I’m making up for it with things that I can do away from the studio and with a baby in my lap. That means a lot of reading, Boggle, and tapping away on my angry little manifesto.

For those who care (all 6 of you), there will be tunes soon. I have a few experiments that I’m trying to make into something worth sharing. The rest of my time is devoted to generating 9 songs and lyrics for a project that I’m putting together with some folks who don’t know about it yet. They’re busy and need to be surprised.

What’s the Problem?

Posted by on May 10, 2011 No comments

Because communication is no longer a problem in our culture, that is to say, access to a large audience no longer requires a large capital investment, there is a belief that any individual should be able to pursue their passion without compromise. This is false.

Life is a web of compromises. Dropping everything to pursue my dream of writing art music would mean sacrificing things that are just as important to me, if not more so, than The Work. That is, if I wanted to pursue my dream in its purest from.

My dream is to spend hours creating beautiful canvases of sound that follow organic forms. I want to explore the limits of technology and music. I imagine trying to capture the sound of Love or Death or Joy. The means exist. If only I could translate that passion and its product into food and shelter. Then I could live the life that is so obviously within my reach, right? And with blogs and the Internet, that’s a breeze, right? Problem solved!

And that’s the source of my frustration. Not every artist has work that can be monetized. And not everyone wants to monetize her work. Does that mean that The Work isn’t important? Does that mean that the artist is a failure? Does that mean that this individual will not contribute to the canon or to the cultural consciousness? Clearly not.

I have been reading a lot lately about creativity and how it fits into the world today. From writing a memoir with no intention of publishing it to finding ways of sneaking in bits and pieces of what we consider to be our calling into our daily lives it seems to me that there has been a demonization of The Day Job in the life of a creative person. As a result, I started writing something down the other day and it won’t stop pouring out. I struck a nerve and it turns out that my relationship to my creative work and what I do for a living is important enough to me to take the time to explain it.

There is a lot of ranting to come. My inner monologue is pretty high pitched right now and the six people who read this blog will be subjected to my manifesto soon enough! But for now, this is a public declaration for accountability purposes. Getting this thing down is important to me and maybe it will be to you.

In the mean time, I am back in the studio tonight and recording more tunes for an upcoming collaboration. Stay tuned!

My Personal iPad Revolution

Posted by on May 6, 2011 No comments

Why does this thing exist?

When the iPad was first introduced, I didn’t get it. It seemed like it wanted to fill a gap that wasn’t there. At that point in time, I was using my iPhone for everything mobile and my MacBook Pro for the heavy lifting. I didn’t see much point to trying to create a space between the two simply for the sake of filling it. Some of my friends felt the same way. Then I got my hands on one and it made complete sense.

To be clear, this device is still very new and the paradigm that it represents is fresh. It’s much more than a big iPhone and at the same time isn’t always less than a laptop. It does have a place and that place is becoming better defined every day.

This isn’t gadget pr0n. I swear.

When I was still hacking away in graduate school, I came across several attempts at touchscreen interfaces. They were first on the order of $10,000 and about a decade later dropped to the $1500 range. And that was for the interface and not the software or the synth hardware that was needed to use it. Regardless of what are now obviously crushing limitations, I got what that could do. Or I thought that I did.

The iPhone interface grabbed me because I could see in an instant how cool it would be to draw sound. TouchOSC does a great job of making that happen. On the iPad, it’s even better. I can control Logic sessions. I can pipe gestures to PureData over wifi. For experimental performers and anyone who does live sound the advantages and pure coolness are obvious. It’s enough to get a lot of music nerds to shell out for the Apple Developer License program and a pile of books to learn Objective-C. Certainly enough to drop about $50 for a catalog of apps that make this dream a reality.

If you’re really into that sort of thing, Curtis (bonus points for being named for Curtis Roads), Gliss, and DopplerPad are great apps to pick up. Why? Because they let you make cool sounds by moving your fingers and that’s what it’s all about. They turn the iPad into a unique musical instrument.

But where the iPad really shines for me is in sketching. And I have to say that my favorite tool is also the source of most of my frustration: GarageBand.

GarageBand

What can I do with GarageBand? Well, I can set up some smart instruments and play with chord patterns. I can take my songs and experiment with drums or bass. I can tweak some synth action that can all be sent over to my Mac, opened in GarageBand, and then sent to Logic for real work (yes, you can skip GarageBand on the Mac but I don’t for a host of reasons whose discussion is for another time). This is great. The interface is amazing for plunking out melodies and picking chord structures (in a well defined key and standard time signature – sorry prog rockers!).

What can’t I do? Well, I can’t take a GarageBand project that I tweak on my Mac and put it back onto the iPad. I understand why. The iPad version is limited to 8 tracks. There are issues with audio data formats. A lot of the innards are just different. But the fact that it’s so easy to create a project and get some momentum going on the iPad is what results in powerful frustration once I hit that first hurdle. It wrecks what could be a really, really nice workflow and replaces the opportunity for doing serious work with a piece with a host of words that make me question the parentage of the product. In short, it does everything so well that it’s a given that it should take it the whole way. That’s actually a compliment for creating a product so great that I just assume that it will do it all. But more than a compliment it’s a source of raging frustration. Yeah, it’ll get there…but I’m here now.

Life after GarageBand

So what do I do about it? Enter Studio.HD. It’s primarily aimed at folks who dig on loops. I don’t, but that doesn’t make it any less useful for me. I can take AIF or WAV files from my Mac and put them into the app via iTunes sharing (OH DEAR LORD PLEASE STOP THE PAIN!!! PLEASE COME UP WITH A BETTER WAY TO GET STUFF INTO MY APPS!!! I AM BEGGING YOU!!!) and then drop them into a multitrack environment that allows me to move snippets around and experiment with my arrangements. It’s really, really easy to use and puts a lot of power into such a tiny device.

The other thing that is great about Studio.HD is that it uses the Sonoma’s Audiocopy. That means that I can pull audio from a number of apps into Studio.HD and make cool things happen. One example is Korg’s iMS-20. It’s a modular synthesizer with a delicious interface that lets me dork around with stuff that I would only dork around with if I had it in my lap. And I do. So I do.

Studio.HD also has just enough features and effects to make working with it worthwhile. Would I use it to produce an album? Maybe. On a desert island. Or as my time for pursuing certain activities becomes so limited that I only have the seconds and minutes I can scrape together between explaining, yet again, Luke Skywalker’s family tree and checking to make sure that the house isn’t on fire. Please don’t take this as disparaging the app. It’s amazing and for $10 you can’t really go wrong.

Bottom line

I’ve mentioned before [link to last post] that I don’t have time for things that don’t work. This really comes down to the fact of my life (and maybe yours too) that I don’t have time. Period. The iPad has become my new way of feeling good about myself and my creative progress. I can open it at a moment’s notice and close it up just as quickly.

And it goes everywhere with me. I’m waiting for the man-bag to come into its own to the point where my son doesn’t refer to my messenger bag as “daddy’s purse.” I need to have it with me. It’s not an addiction like the smart phone early adopters, but rather a mature need to have what I do with me all the time so that I can feel like what’s important to me is not only in my mind, but also at my fingertips when I have a few minutes. If I can push a project along even a little bit while I’m at lunch or waiting for the doctor or even with a sleeping baby on my lap, then the device has more than paid for itself.

Apps

If you are a musician and you have an iPad, then at the bare minimum you owe yourself GarageBand and Studio.HD. For the grand total of about $15, you’ll have that imaginary studio in your hand that we were promised along with flying cars and meals in pill form.

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.