I’m a week into Andrew Huang’s Monthly Course, which is a songwriting/producing workshop. Over 30 days, we’re writing three songs. Which means at this point, I should be most of the way to having having the first song. I think I am, but I’ve been pushing on the “everything sucks” phase.

Thinking back, it’s been a while since I last spent a solid week looking at a single song. Simply having pacing and a comparison from the course has been useful. It’s been an opportunity to look critically at process.

The course so far is good. There’s a lot of material, and Andrew moves quite quickly. I find myself nodding along quite a bit. I do know this. Best I actually do it too. It would be a lot for a new producer to take in at once. The guideline is 1-2 hours of producing a day, which seems about right but I’ve found myself spending more when I feel stuck and having fun. But it really depends on how fast you work, and what your learning objectives are. There’s lots to try out and think with.

The course also says there’s about 15 minutes of video a day. On average, maybe. Day 5 dropped 3 hours of videos. The averages belie the details here!

Andrew steps through many examples, all in the context of the one song. The process is highly iterative. He jumps from notes, to sound design, to interplay between instruments and the bigger picture regularly. Showing how many variations on an idea he goes through, he’ll settle on something good enough and move on.

While the details will fade, and the confidence of familiarity will grow slowly, here’s the lesson worth taking so far. Many previous attempts at songwriting have focused on getting all the notes in, then getting all the sounds, then working on the transitions. Mostly, in a linear fashion. Here, we’re being shown everything is provisional. We need to be happy enough to commit, but there’s always an opportunity to revisit.

Move fast. Move on. Revisit.

Back when writing Brave New World, I would bounce ideas off my writing partner. This naturally lead to stopping and reorienting. When I did FAWM, the time pressure meant that demos were often made in one writing session. Which forced moving fast, and accepting good enough. I’ve found it harder without these constraints to keep enough structure to keep momentum.

At each moment, what we have should sound like half a song. Not, half the parts of a song.

Having had a solid twelve days off has been really nice. I haven’t had the opportunity to chill and sleep in like that for a while. Spent plenty of time reading, playing games and catching up with people. As well as doing nothing in particular!

New Years Eve was spent playing games online with a few friends, and dropping in on a larger group on a different Discord server. It’s nice to have been able to do that. Not the same as doing it in person. At least I didn’t have to be split between two cities.

Back to work today, somewhat refreshed. Nights and mornings have slowly been getting later. So I’ve counter-acted that with a couple early mornings and a cup of coffee. We tidied up a bunch of loose ends before Christmas, which was nice. Time to get back on with the re-platform project.

I’ve signed up to Andrew Huang’s Monthly course, which I’ll report back on. I didn’t spend as much time as I thought I might making music over the break. But, knowing this was coming I spent a chunk of time rearranging the keyboard and music area upstairs. With luck, everything I need will be in arms reach and ready to go.

Quern

We’ve sunk hours into Quern (which is still on sale on Steam and GOG). It’s a first-person puzzle game in the tradition of Myst. The game takes place on a single world, and the areas are slowly revealed. There’s a good level of item reuse and holding items for a while. Some head-scratching for where to go next, but the puzzles do make sense. Overall, thumbs-up if you like that type of game.

There’s always the question of why the world-builders made their worlds like that. If you were living there, would you really hide doors behind a puzzle where you have to bounce a beam of light five times or counter-balance three sets of weights? Quern’s backstory has a nice solve for this, at least with my reading of it. The guiding narrator was just so damn bored. Quern is a world without time. One of the later puzzles is set up like a roulette wheel, because… what else are you going to do with infinite time? You have to entertain your guests.

Wasn’t going to do a year in review post. But since Christmas plans are officially cancelled. Here’s what I’ve got.

I have been experimenting with tarot, and at other ways of approaching the world. Trying to balance the analytical and intuitive sides of myself. I’ve also fallen into the into the orbit of Gordon White. His his discussions with Austin Coppeck introduced me to longer cycle astrology.

In The Chaos Protocols, Gordon White describes a process of planning. Check your calendar and what you consciously know about what’s to come. But, also consult the space weather (your horoscope), and the cards. What are you missing? What is the terrain going to be like?

If it wasn’t for this openness to framing, this year could have been very different for me.

As far back as January. I had heard the astrological space weather being a “meat grinder”. Sophia and I also did a tarot spread for the year. We did a large spread. And the cards that stood out to me were The High Priestess and the Six of Swords.

The High Priestess is a card of internal contemplation and receptivity. It was in a position for the personal realm. And it aligned with where I had come where I was. The Six of Swords represented conditions in the world.

The deck we used was the True Black Tarot. And it is gorgeous. Each card is a thick, matte, black card stock. Each with a full colour image that pops against the background. The glossy black detailing plays with the light in the room. I have had some particularly striking reads with it. Pulling a card with a clam on it when we visited The Shell Grotto in Margate in January was apt and fun. Pulling a bloodied white wolf the day that I found a little old lady bleeding in the street freaked me out. (She was well looked after.)

The Six of Swords depicts a caravan of boats in the fog. Which, as an analogy, maps well to 2020. Supply chain disruption. Cancellation of travel. Stagnation. Isolation. Even an awareness to the quality of air.

And this has been in my wider awareness since January. It surprised me how good the month had been to us. We saw family. We got to spend time by the sea in Margate. We visited galleries and roamed vintage shops.

In February, I was busy doing FAWM. In the middle where we got to see some friends for a long night of drinks in London, starting in the Black Hart. One of my best friends had recently returned home from an extended stay abroad. Another was talking about buying a house and moving in the summer. This did not happen. But they are now looking to move the beginning of next year.

On the weekend of the 14th of March, went to an event in London, and then followed it up with drinks for a family birthday. And everybody had the feeling like this was the last moment that we had together for a while. Two days later, measures were announced, and lockdown began the week after. But, it was already on the tip of our tongues.

I have a confession to make. I wanted to work from home more. When the early stories were coming about China, then Italy I was thinking “no, it can’t be that serious”. I also thought back to the cues from the cards and space weather. I wouldn’t have chosen it, but I was prepared to flip to “this is how I live now”. If it lasted a day over a month, I was prepared for the storm to last eighteen. I embraced it with a knowing of what was out my control. An opportunity for The High Priestess to shine.

That first lockdown was announced for one month. Then extended three weeks. I was hearing the statement we’d be back in the office by summer, then in September, then Christmas, now Easter. My sympathies for that not coming to pass. For me, there is a dissonance between the claim for extreme measures and an optimistic timeline.

That last night out in March was fantastic. Host knows how to put on an event. We had a live band, a dancer, and drum ‘n’ bass. When our hired venue closed, we then went on a bar crawl with parents, cousins and aunt in tow. We stayed out as late as we could. It was a rare night with everyone on the same wavelength, up for enjoying it, as full as we can.

March into April was a month of great shifts. The lockdown brought Sophia and me into our home, and devastated our plans for the year. We had intended to go to Roadburn. The Netherlands was not yet at the point on its timeline where things were closing. And there was a lots of uncertainty. If everything did blow over perhaps we would still be able to go from the UK to the Netherlands. This did not come to pass. They cancelled the event as late as they could, with the intention to reschedule for 2021. At this point, that is not happening, either. The event is now pushed yet another year.

During this time, Spain was having a more extreme moment, compared to what was going on in the UK. In May, friends were due to wed in Madrid, and to emigrate there. And over April, there would have been a stag do. The planning stalled as we knew that we would be unable to see each other. With heartache, the wedding was postponed for a year. We shared our condolences about the personal impact.

The summer is a blur of a groundhog day. Roll out of bed. Commute one room to an improvised desk. Both of us working in the same room, ignoring each other, on video calls to different people. It took me too long to find a desk I liked, and to move my working space into another room. My back is still suffering for it, but improving.

It was a jarring and disembodied time. A breakdown of communication ensued. She was hit harder by the disruption to our routine. And the removal of travel, live music, and casual drinks. Not only from the present, but the plannable future. We were stripped of our usual coping mechanisms.

We did have a high point of seeing the family during the summer between stricter lockdowns. We had more candid and reflective conversations. We all had stuff to deal with, and have had the time to think.

We went to emptier and emptier cinemas. And, other than the Cyberpunk campaign, summer felt like undifferentiated time. Even though we could, maybe, see people, nobody was organising. We had been catching up with friends online, but this came in waves too. The need for the change of pace was why we went to Wales, before the opportunity was taken away from us.

The more recent months have been documented in Weeknotes. Internal work has allowed public writing, as a response to the conditions forced upon us. It provides a pulse and definition to the week that was otherwise lacking.

In many ways, I’ve had an easy year of it. The company and my work was able to adapt. I do not live alone. I live near green space in a less affected area. My family are in good health. For which I am grateful. But this was not hermiting by choice. Returning to The High Priestess, it has been a process of coming to terms with a stolen year and sundering of expectations. As it has been for us all.

And since the middle of the year, in small ways, each month has been better and better. The removal of all travel has shown how much of a drain it can be. And, it’s made space to put some of the fundamentals in better order. And, it’s made time to think, and read, and make music (sadly without company). We’ve gone from binge watching old TV shows, to putting our energy into things that interest us.

I don’t know what next year holds. But consulting wider sources has served me well. Some thing will need focus, and others to be accepted. I intend to do the same for next year.

This interregnum must come to an end. And it will. The timeline is just out of our individual control.

Have your best Christmas. It’s all you can do. x

I’ve had the Synthstrom Deluge for a little under a week. I’ve got to say, I love it. It’s feature packed beast in a small footprint. It’s a multitrack sequencer, sampler, polyphonic synthesizer, drum machine, groove box extraordinare. It has an incredibly cohesive design, and a ton of music making potential just in this one box. It’s simple to pick up, but to take full advantage it’s got a learning curve.

It’s only very slightly larger than my old 11 inch MacBook Air. A bit thicker. It is very hands on. It’s got dedicated knobs for navigation and effects. And the entire 144 buttons that control the setup step sequencer acts as a secondary display, and access to the modulation matrix. Even though it’s got a four character display, you do not have to do much menu diving.

I was looking for a way to produce and demo some songs that doesn’t feel like working with a mouse and keyboard. I think I’ve found it. The grid of buttons feels very different to working with a touch screen.

While trying to learn the features of the Deluge, I’ve been doing a rework of an old song of mine that I know like the back of my hand. And I realised the song is ten years old! And so is the band. That time was tinged with trepidation about the working world, and the great shifts that moving and a fixed work schedule brought.

The rock band I was in at uni was winding down, and a couple of us were looking to do something different. It was an intense period of time, and we put together about 20 minutes of material over that month.

This year had a similar sundering of expectations. There are restrictions on movement, and being able to see friends. And, undifferentiated time in front of a screen. It’s not too surprising that I’ve wanted to return music, my old friend. And, in a way that isn’t spending more time in front of a computer.

In general, my creative output has been lumpy. And this is fine. Yet, I’m hoping having a dedicated device with an integrated workflow is going to make it easier to do a small bit here and there, between those focused periods.

Baba is You

And, I’ve also put 10 hours into Baba is You this week. Considering I spent zero hours playing computer games last week this is a step change. It’s a cute, but challenging puzzler. You push blocks around and change the rules of the game, which had made for serious head-scratching and lateral thinking.