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.
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