It’s funny (or maybe not so much) that almost a year ago to the day, I wrote in another blog:

“How do folks balance the different aspects of their lives? We all have obligations, passions, requirements, and interests. The things we do to live; the things we live to do. What happens when those two (or three or four) aspects compete?”

So I’ve a question for anyone out there who cares to respond: How do you manage the demands of the everyday versus the time for your creative pursuits? *

Personally, I’m having a helluva time getting things done, and I’m getting spun up because, well, time flies. A week will go by and…

• I didn’t get to practice Piano, or…
• That idea I had about my latest track (”Mehdi”) didn’t get auditioned (and I’m not quite sure what it was now anyway)…
• Oops meant to get that Blog entry out…

And that’s just the music-related stuff! 

I probably sound like a disorganized rube. It’s not that. I do get a lot of stuff done. It’s just that precious little of it is related to this aspect of things. I also understand that Life Happens and you just get on with it the best you can. And besides, this “problem” is a good problem to have in the larger scheme of things.

$3000 worth of plug-ins for $499 from November 1 – 15. Check it out here.

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Hey!

Another quick update, this time on music production and music tool tutorials.

When you post a “how-to” question about music software on some discussion boards, you can often get a “RTFM” (Read The Effin’ Manual) response. And although I essentially agree with the sentiment, I find that a) I hardly have time,** and b) the softwares we are dealing with are increasingly complex. And those two facts tend to reinforce each other.

Because of this, I think my learning style has changed. I appreciate and enjoy video tutorials. I can see and watch how something is done, and I pick it up much quicker. Of late, I’ve come across some really nice tutorials:

• Digital Performer by MacAudioLab– First up is a set of new DP6 tutorials from MacAudioLab. These were just released in the last month or so. They are the only comprehensive set of tutorials on DP6 on the market at present. (The other set of DP6 tutorials out there by TutorialDepot are decent bite-sized chunks, but I’d hardly call them comprehensive.) Some of the material is taken from their DP5 tutorials (the bits that have not changed between versions), but there is A LOT of new material including several tutorials on MOTU’s VIs (MX4, MachFive2, Ethno) plus other material.

MOTU DP keyboard by Logickeyboard (no less) - Logickeyboard’s custom keyboard for Motu Digital Performer is available though only using the Ultra Thin Aluminum Apple Pro keyboard at the moment. It features all the regular letter, number, and symbol labelling found on a conventional keyboard, so it can be used as your regular keyboard. It’s a bit pricey, but Logickeyboard tells me that they are also developing a set of replacement keycaps for older style Apple keyboards. (This will be much less expensive obviously.)

Bandcamp – I’m probably a little late to announcing this party, but Bandcamp is another free music distribution/viral marketing/sell-your-music-directly-to-the-public site that looks the business. It provides “drop-dead easy tools to share your music with their friends, and most importantly we do it in a way that drives traffic back to you. We also give you complete transparency into how your music is spreading…” The last point refers to their extensive online stats which are pretty impressive. Check out the screencast.   

SoundCloud goes live – I know for sure that I’m late announcing this party, but SoundCloud officially opened to the public recently. SoundCloud is a music distribution/viral marketing/’net 2.0 kind of application with a focus a bit different from Bandcamp. SoundCloud is not really set-up for the general public to find music for downloading.

Just a quick update…and an experiment in “mobile posting”. (I’m on a break during jury duty.)

I posted 30 seconds of this track to SoundCloud almost a month ago. (Check out the “Current Music Projects” page link in the first column on the right near the top of the page.)  At the time I thought I would have it finished in another week or two. Ha! Hardly. It’s taken me longer for a couple of reasons:

• Life happens. This being a new dad thing requires a lot of time!
• I’ve been pushing myself to use more of my tools. This means I’ve been burning some time making things a bit more complicated than they need to be so that I can try using these tools. For example, I lost a solid week trying to use an instance of Battery3 in a multi-output configuration with KORE2 inside Digital Performer 6. Not really necessary as you can accomplish much of the same thing without KORE. And in the end I just set up Battery with multiple outs not using KORE at all.* Now I knew how to do that from the start, but I don’t consider it a waste of time as I learned quite a bit (though it was a tad frustrating).

• As I work on this piece, my conception of it evolves.

I was just cruising around on Loscil’s MySpace page recently. (You can find the link to that and a few others under “Check these out” in the right most column.) Under their “Blog” section is a link to the Relay Project. The project is described as “A dialogue between sound artists curated by Chequerboard“.

Relay website (so far)

More specifically:

“Commissioned by the Model Arts and Niland Gallery as part of model::offsite, Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Lambert will invite a selection of irish and international sound artists and musicians to contribute to Relay over the duration of the project. He will record an initial sound work and then relay this piece to the first contributor. Each work will be published online as it is completed, and this page will map the path of this dialogue of ideas between artists.”

I love efforts like this. We have open to us so many new avenues for collaboration and exploration … and the costs for doing so approach zero.

The possibilities are legion.