Category Archives: inspiration

Synchrony

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I’m having a creative phase right now! Several things have lined up —

We’re finally settled into the new house. The seedlings I brought over from the old house are doing well. The plants and I are putting down roots.

I’ve been meeting with my Discord group for about a year! Because of this group I’m getting more consistent about working on music. It’s great to have some people to report back to every 2 weeks.

I JUST installed some software that I purchased 6 months ago. Now I’m exploring these new plugins.

I hit # 500 on my Random Note compositions, and decided to kick it up a notch by entering the latest ones into FL Studio, at least in sketch form. Because of this I’ve been spending about twice as much time on music every day.

These little compositions were interesting enough that it gave me the craving to make videos again. My previous video editing software is gone (motherboard from previous computer died). It was called Movavi and much as I loved it, its latest upgrades have gone off in a direction I didn’t like. I decided to bite the bullet and purchase something different. I picked Pinnacle Studio because it’s a one-time purchase, NOT a subscription model. It’s by Corell and I’ve had good experiences with their software. …So I’ve been struggling with learning Pinnacle Studio for the past 2 weeks. I made a sort of test video and now I’m working on a “welcome back to the channel” video.

A couple days ago I installed Audacity 3.0 on my new computer. This version of Audacity is a little different than what I worked with 5 years ago — it saves projects with a different file extension — but otherwise very similar. The interface looks the same. …I had been putting off this decision because I wanted to force myself to learn Reaper, or, the new Audacity with the new interface and features. But I finally decided to just take it easy on myself and stick to the familiar. As soon as I started editing a sound clip in Audacity I got such a wave of nostalgia. Memories came flooding back — layering and transforming sound clips in a journey of discovery. It’s a safe and familiar place. It surprised me to get such a strong emotional reaction to some SOFTWARE. But wow, it’s good to be back!

Here’s Tantacrul (Martin Keary) talking about the latest changes to Audacity. I have such positive feelings about Martin so I will definitely try it some day.

And just for nostalgia, here’s the video that came out when I was first learning FL Studio. I still think this song is a banger lol

 

Trouble with Focus and Organization

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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.

 

 

 

 

Inspiration from Thor and Nahre Sol

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“It’s OK to fail. It would be good if young people were taught this instead of having to learn it later in life”

“Every little tiny thing that you do is a step towards scaling that wall, that was terrifying before”

We want to perform well, improvise freely, procrastinate less, publish content. But there are barriers. Confidence is something that you can learn to build over time. Sometimes experience takes care of this. “Whenever my self-confidence levels are low, two things happen: supreme performance anxiety and supreme SUPREME procrastination”