Since the change in “regime” on Jan. 20, I’ve had a lot of trouble with focus. This past 2 weeks I didn’t hand in any work — even my daily random note exercise had been impossible. I would sit in front of the piano, unable to think. After 300-some random note exercises, it’s interesting that that behavior was knocked off the rails. “I was so upset I couldn’t even do my favorite thing”.
I had my bi-annual meeting with my psychiatrist the previous week and we talked about some behavioral strategies to help with the anxiety. These have been working, and my hum of background anxiety is growing quieter. Yesterday I was unexpectedly gifted with a beautiful set of bookshelves. I decided to make a tapestry fabric panel for the front, and use the rest of the fabric for a screen for the other end of the room. This process took several hours. By the end of it I felt the most normal I had in weeks, and I woke up this morning feeling clear as well.
But even when I am anxiety-free, I still have a lot of trouble deciding WHAT to do. Ex. what to work on first! I think the problem I have with clutter and disorganization also relates to my difficulty with making decisions. The times I’ve done the best with organization and decision making are when there’s a beautiful, singular creative idea that over-arches and unifies the process.
I also have the occasional day when I wake up with clarity and look around and say “I can’t stand X any more, and I know just what to do to fix it”. And other times something makes me angry to the point where I think “fuck it, I’m throwing this stuff away”. But I can’t be too angry, because that leads to destructive decisions! There’s a Goldilocks zone which doesn’t happen very often.
In conclusion, I’m able to make decisions when
it’s just the right kind of project
I’m in just the right mood.
Here is a video I watched today while having lunch. It inspired today’s line of thought.
I’ve been thinking about what I will work on after my album project is done. I’m still working on my Random Notes of the Day but currently I’m guided by my mood and patience level. At some point it might be interesting to challenge myself to write in a series of different genres.
This vid talks about “Library Music” — music that was recorded specifically to be used for film and TV — and the many genres it encompasses.
Note, I had not heard of this Youtuber before. He has an interesting series of videos.
Longer answer — many opinions within the heavy metal community
The Unholy Trinity of Protometal — Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple (though nowadays people consider Led Zeppelin to be “classic rock”)
Heavy Metal music was written during the 60s to late 70s — “Much of the development after that, while being both heavy and metal, isn’t considered Heavy Metal” by musicians in the genre. Taxonomy!
Riff based featuring tritones, half steps, flat 9s, flat 6s, “and other dissonant and atonal gestures”
“Good riffs can sound heavy even if you play them acoustic” — not just a matter of tuning everything down. But, “though dissonance is the seed of heaviness, it’s not the whole story”
This is an especially good episode, I hope to come back to it and take more notes!
Chromatic Neighbor Embellishment — Could be the title of a track on a Prog album?
embellishments — add color or sense of motion to main note
Neighbor motion — goes to one of the notes on either side, then comes back
chromatic neighbor motion — moves a semitone. Might not be in the key
Chromatic embellishments of cheerful major key melodies are part of the musical identity of Mario games
not just melody but also harmony and bass notes move like this
Note — these early games had limited polyphony because of sound board. Spells out a chord with root, 5th, and melody note is the 3rd of the chord. If revoiced, the interval between the top notes would be a third. Koji Kondo in interviews said he wanted to use interval of a 6th because it sounds fuller. So — three note spread voice chord, with root on the bottom — means the 3rd has to be on top.
Melody E, Eb, F, E is called Double Neighbor Embellishment; later there’s a chromatic passing note in a run
We are making good progress on getting my new rig together. The motherboard arrived, and the graphics card is on the way. I still have to make some decisions about RAM, storage, and fans. (Budget? Go all out? Should I get shiny ones with rainbow LEDs?) I’m getting more excited about jumping into Unreal 5 and trying things out — just putting objects together and adding sound to it. For example, you walk up to a sphere and as you get closer the sound is louder. Or the sound changes.
Here’s Thor Hall encouraging beginners like me to give it a try. Someone called him the Mister Rogers of game design and that seems so fitting.
Another thing I’m looking forward to with the new rig is downloading some music software. I’m especially looking forward to this plugin, called “Noctua”. Cameron had the idea to put together a collection of samples, including ones he recorded using a microphone that can “hear” electromagnetic fields (called an EMF microphone). With help from folks at UVI and after a year of work, this collection of samples became an actual software instrument, with ways to modify the sounds and layer them. Cameron’s project is free, and the plugin from UVI required to play it (called UVI Workstation) is free also.
You can learn anything you want to. Anything. The idea that you are too old to learn is insane to me. You can learn anything dude. So learn some shit and stop worrying about “Oh man is it too late for me?” No. No! Stop putting invisible barriers in front of yourself as an excuse for not just sitting there and learning some new shit. Don’t give yourself an excuse. Just go do it. You could go onto Youtube right now and learn any goddam thing you want to. There’s a video for that. There’s a tutorial for that; you have access to all of it.
Thor is one of my newer discoveries — I found him because he popped up on Youtube shorts. Apparently these are snippets from his gaming streams? He is talking to younger folks; a lot of them are asking him “how did you get to where you are”. He has some encouraging words for them. Little does he know, he’s also encouraging this old lady.
You don’t need to be an amazing programmer, chat. Do you know why? Because Undertale exists. Undertale is one of the worst programmed things I have ever seen. It is horrible. There are rooms that have hundreds of if statements in a row checking the same value and then it sets the value to zero and then it checks it again. All of the dialogue in all of Undertale is in a single switch case statement thousands of cases long. For the whole game. But you’d never know that. And it doesn’t matter. Because the player doesn’t care. And the player would never know. That’s it! Go make games.
I’m applying this advice to myself as a musician. According to this vid, I am indeed part of the intended audience:
“The hardest way to make something is to wait until the time is right to do it”
“I compared the last year of my Youtube watch history as it relates to gear content as versus the amount of music I had made every month, and it turns out mainlining the flood of content is pretty bad for my ability to create anything”
“Just because you enjoy collecting gear and instruments and plugins or whatever doesn’t mean you need to make music with them — I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that whatsoever…I just like having them around and I play them every once in a while and it brings me a lot of joy…but, I’ve found myself getting sucked down this rabbit hole of Gear Acquisition Syndrome many times…and that’s the problem, when it actively inhibits my ability to create something”
He talks about the psychology of it — ex. with gamblers, the dopamine comes from the anticipation of the win, not the win itself. You get excited waiting to buy a new piece of gear, you buy it, and find out it doesn’t make music on its own. “We waste so much time waiting around to create something.”
So here’s my situation! I want to finish my Planet Project, “The Last of the 300 Worlds”. The last time I sat in front of a computer and made music was the summer of 2021, when I worked with my music tutor and handed in a bunch of music every 2 weeks. The goal then was to make a rough draft of the entire video soundtrack — have some music for all the sections of the video. I did succeed at that! and at one point the time crunch forced me into a solution I would not have come up with otherwise!
During the intervening time, many things have gotten in the way of making music. Because of Covid, I’m no longer a church musician, something that had been part of my life since 2001. Along with contact with other musicians, and practicing and performing music, it also added structure to my life. A schedule; deadlines. Pushing through social phobia.
Another disruptive process was finding a new home and moving from a place we had lived for 25 years. Soon after we moved, there were more changes. My dad passed away, and my mom about 6 months after that. My husband was in the hospital for a week. I got diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder.
Now after having been in the new house for more than a year, I feel much more content here. We planted the special trees we brought with us and bought several more — 25 in all! We set up the chickens and other pet birds. Just in the last month we installed 6 bookcases (two of which I built from scratch) and unpacked 35 bankers’ boxes full of books, 3 ring binders, and my beloved spiral bound graph paper notebooks. They are still out of order, so I can’t put a hand on the notebooks I was writing in during the summer of 2021. But they’re in my office!
And, I’ve touched base with my music tutor, who is in what he hopes will be the final semester of his music degree. We had a wonderful conversation, and plan to work together some time in the near future.
Why am I waiting?
The main thing holding me back from creating right now is my work space. My daughter is in the process of building me a new rig — one that will be able to run my DAWs, softsynths, and video editing software without chugging. I’m waiting for that with eager anticipation, as if it will solve all my problems. I also dislike working in my office now because it’s so cluttered and cramped. I haven’t yet found the power supplies for my synths and midi controllers, haven’t attached my audio interface. And my computer itself is so stuffed with files that there’s only a few hundred gig left on disk C. I’m afraid to try to run anything!
This house is set up differently than where we lived before. We have gained a beautiful living room and family room and two more bathrooms! But we have lost our outdoor detached garage and pole barn. A lot of things are stored in the garage and basement and they are packed so tightly that it’s hard to go through them, to sort and discard. A HUGE thing I could do is start the process of having a barn built. I’m scared to make the phone call. I had been postponing the decision (“Isn’t it selfish?”) until we had a minor flood in the basement and I realized that a lot of things we have in the basement should be stored somewhere else. Having more room is something that would benefit the whole family, not just me.
— More space, so my office can become a music studio instead of the place I put everything I haven’t made a decision about
— Find the power supplies and cables to attach the equipment I have
— Clear some space on my current computer
— Spend some time as a musician every day. Watching videos and responding to them counts! Listening to Dr. Greenberg’s audio courses. Listening to the concerto posted on Balloon Juice blog by a contemporary composer. Reading Jake Lizzio’s book on chords. Flash cards. Listening to Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier while looking at the score.
— Go back to the music I created in 2021. It’s currently in FL Studio. Start the process of moving it over to Ableton Live, so I can share files with my tutor. Are there parts I want to re-write? What parts fit the storyline and mood of the video, what parts don’t fit well?
That’s 5 items — that feels kind of overwhelming.
Barn
Attach midi controller and audio interface
Current computer — organize
Study music
re-acquaint myself with Planet Project
That’s good for now! Here’s the video by Venus Theory that I found so inspiring.
I found this bit of music used on a video about an egg hatching, and tracked it down here. (It’s an example of royalty-free music. Interesting — does the artist get paid for creating royalty-free music?)
What I like about this is that even though the melody / chords are sweet, there’s a sense of unease. I think it’s the texture of the violin bow scrapings that make things unsettling.
It’s been a long time since I’ve made a video. I really missed it! It takes hours, but probably because I go on wild goose chases (ex. finding the perfect picture of Helen of Troy). Coordinating the visual with the soundtrack is my favorite part. If I were going to do this one over again, I would make sure that the background was the right size (so there’s no black border), and that the background didn’t have a pattern that’s slanted! I could have gone back and cropped all the black out, but that would have meant re-doing the captions, and it was 3 am, so…
This semester I have found out that I have health issues that have become chronic. I’m on a new medication, which may help, but it takes a long time to act. In the meantime, I can work on lifestyle changes that minimize symptoms. Getting good sleep is very important. Does that mean no more artists’ life for me? But…there’s already so many things I’ve had to eliminate. Coffee, tea, dairy, tomatoes (no pizza! no lasagna!). Do I have to give up my late night sessions, too? Working on a creative project — riding out the wave of inspiration til 3 am — is one of the great pleasures in my life. I hope my body will let me get away with it… once a week?
Watched a strange little movie this evening called The Brand New Testament. It’s a Belgian film, a surreal comedy with beautiful music.
One of the strangest and most beautiful parts of the movie is when a lonely young girl has a dream about the hand that she lost in an accident years ago.
The music used here is “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Handel’s opera “Rinaldo”. The lyrics mean “Let me weep over my cruel fate, and let me sigh for liberty. May sorrow shatter these chains for my torments, just out of pity”.
I found another version of this aria by a French soprano named Patricia Petibon…
…which made me curious about her. Yes, she really does have red hair! Here she is singing the Queen of the Night aria from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”. I loved watching her facial expressions and the movements of the conductor.
The Queen of the Night is like an over-the-top comic book villain. This version features soprano Diana Damrau. She appears to be laser-beaming her daughter with those high F’s.
“Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen,
Tod und Verzweiflung flammet um mich her!”
The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart,
Death and despair flame about me!
