in the summer

you gotta do it for yourself. i was talking to someone yesterday about this. the internet is so huge that it’s like… waah. and it’s all so spikey. you gotta, and it’s hard, but you gotta build it up from nothing into what you want. it’s best to work off-grid, and then bring what you have to the internet when you’re ready. if you start anywhere else, the fire is destined to burn out since it’s not rooted in your own desire. when it is, it’s easier to keep going.

the worst part is this approach is super lonely, so i make myself sane by having very meaningful friendships offline. the specific thing i like most there is the irl music video showings. i did one in november for waterfalls, and might get to do one next week or so for in the summer. that is, if the project is actually finished by then.

also, take small steps. and a billion of those steps. it’s very easy to look at people and get jealous of whatever. i know that feeling too well, but it’s interesting slowly moving into the place where people do it to me.

no i dont really find the stats useful. most of the time it’s just an anxiety meter. i might add sitewide and server-side resource analytics just so i can be aware if i need to spend more money on the server. but i’ve been a pretty big opponent to the “view counter”.

i have at least. many of my friends have since i show it to them, usually in person these days. for in the summer, i think about 15-20 people have watched it so far.

published to everyone

ok this is on me. and it’s a funny story i think. when i published initially, i manually removed the permissions check for that file, but then a few days later when i published my private blog, it re-scanned the permission file definition, which ended up re-gating those files.

this was mostly an artifact of me publishing stuff from a laptop in michigan instead of in proper on my real desktop.

though i spot a new bug, the fragments dir is really fucked up

it’s probably possible. i always think about the stars in the sky because i usually don’t get to see them.

i still worry the stars forgot about me.

billion things but here is one of each

same: playing with all the instruments available, placing real world characters in 3d worlds

different: i want more varied structure regarding lyrics, having certain video scenes be ultra ultra minimal.

album 1 is “done”, sort of cancelled while the tracks get scrapped for parts on singles like waterfalls and in the summer. “when everything froze” got produced but just thrown into the archives.

i still want to finish an album for real. and i’ve been taking a different approach to it than before. to be blunt, i’m just trying to finish some projects for real. there is a loose theme between everything (intimacy), and i’m about 2 and a half songs in, with a dozen more that i’d like to produce. the final album would be some set of these that i’m happy with. i’ll put more time onto music once some other tasks lighten up.

i consider both my career as a software engineer and my artistic stuff as my regular job. one day i will just be doing art stuff, but working towards that point. for example, last year i had a full month where i funded my own art ventures, which is how we got the video for in the summer produced so quickly.

yes. tho i recognize the way you’re asking this because it’s something me 5 years ago would’ve asked myself now, and no the core of the system is the same.

over the years, i changed softwares from beepbox to fruityloops to bitwig (2022-2023) to logic (waterfalls) to reaper (in the summer, new home, and all the other ongoing demos). the sound hasn’t really changed at all, maybe from beepbox since that is mostly chiptune tools. i’ve gotten better at utilizing the number of tracks, getting more satisfying layerings of instruments as well as satisfying switches of instruments.

i havent written too many scripts – the only big one being “the down button” which i’ll get to in a second – because i still havent really figured out what even is the workflow i am trying to automate?? like i tried to drive the car without building it first. so been hoping that this album project gets me farther along that route. the thing i’ve gotten very satisfied with is my vocal recording process. while i got better at singing by a lot, the big revelation was to use two tracks for vocals. one “staging” track and then a “commit” track. reaper has nice comping features, but i’ve had a lot of problems when i record a song out of order (say i record section 3 then 2); the new recording if i don’t press stop quickly enough will become the active take for the start of section 3 then the comp becomes a mess. the trick: once i decide to “lock in” a comp. i move it from the staging track down onto the commit track. only ever record to staging, no overlaps. it was such a good and productive idea that i have a specific “down button” which performs take-crop-to-active-take-in-items and then item-edit-move-items-envelope-points-down-one-track-a-bit to collapse the comp clip into the single chosen take, and then moves the selected clip down one track. a beautiful script.

the one other trick i have is i have three buttons for controlling an active recording: one to save and restart the take, one to restart the take without saving, and then a stop button. i settled on this after a lot of testing during recording sessions, and mostly being annoyed at the reaper dialog for this. no other set of automatic code for music has really improved productivity yet, just these two. because they’re simple and driven out of the workflow, built in real time. though i think i plan to add a bunch of “quick presets”, though that also involves deciding what those presets are. i think i’m tired of searching the FX menu for some built in reaper fx, as well as the common set of plugins i use. i want quick buttons for all of these soon, but it might be smarter to actually save specific instrument/fx patches instead of the plugins themselves. kind of like bill wurtz’s 100 instrument system or whatever that was about. like i just pick out “the one grand piano sound” and assign a name to all the sounds i care about. probably good thing to do after my next AV project.

a big change i am trying out now is using microsoft onenote version 2007 as the main writing tool. it has some insane tech for the time, as well as a lot of useful note taking features. but this is sort of “pre-production” than “production”.

slowly figuring stuff out. the game as i understand it is you gotta do as little as possible and spend as little time as possible. the simpler the project the simpler the mix. when mixing now, i tend to favor big broad changes that actually make a difference. then after enough play throughs, it’s good. i mostly use ReaEq and some other stock plugins for making adjustments