My previous post was the latest of my summer stash (I think the mention to an ice cream factory was a dead giveaway :P).
Before those posts, if you just tuned in, I used to log my daily musical activity in this blog, and then decided to move to private logging and see how it went. Here are a few reflections about the experiment: * Reliability: I skipped two days (as in "damn, I totally forgot to log yesterday"), something that never happened to me when I reported online. Peer pressure, I guess, although given enough time I would probably have skipped some day online too. As a countermeasure, I decided "joining by the hip" the logging to the music activities; i.e., writing about the activities of the day right after finishing one of them. So far it's worked successfully, in fact it has built a beautiful ritual where I love to call it a day, make myself a coffee/yerba while thinking about what just happened, and then play some other people's music and write my daily entry. It works so far, conditioned to the fact that what I've never skipped is doing something music related every day, even if it is only touching base when circumstances have become a bit dense. *Fun/Not so fun: I maintain the framework of doing every day a fun activity + a not so fun too. When there's not enough time, I limit myself to the fun part. Working the definition, I've found that composing is a beast of its own, often belonging to the category "it's complicated", so it's important to keep an eye open on when some fun task has crossed to the not-so-fun side (and sometimes viceversa too!) *Swiftness and deepness: at first I thought it would be awkward to write just for myself, that I would not know where to start, lacking the objectivation and discipline that imposes on you trying to be understood by others. But I've found that, on the contrary, I write more easily and profoundly. None of the causes have anything to do with rocket science: firstly, I write in my native language, Spanish (something that for many reasons would not make sense when publishing out there), and I'm no rookie --I used to be a writing geek, with many many pages under my belt, so my hands fly over the keyboard easily. Also, writing for myself I don't need to be selective about what I decide to tell and what to keep outside for being too intimate, uninteresting, etc. For the same reason, I don't have to explain a lot of references that for me are obvious but would be cryptic for an external reader; I can skip steps and mean a lot with only this or that sentence or adjective. So the activity of logging has become even more benefiting for my musical activity than it used to be. Writing this way also provides me with a huge repertoire of themes, so what I'm going to do from now on with this blog is taking the tastiest excerpts out of the orchard and publishing them here. At the moment I will commit to the "one post within each week" schedule and see how it goes. This post is a bit "meta", as no music has been discussed so far. Here's where I stand. My goal of publishing an album in November and another one in December has been derailed. I still could have one of both albums done by the end of December, I think. Some songs will be out before the end of the year, for sure. "Now you're talking" is almost done, and after some works of reconstruction that looked like one of those 26 hours operations, It pleases me a lot. The thing is this season I'm working intensely on my processes, and until I reach basic stability it makes no sense to tell precise dates. The flower metaphor is of application here; you can be careful about the watering regime, choose the best soil, organize yourself to make the most of sunny days... but you cannot pull the flower to make it grow quicker. A part of the process cannot be influenced, cannot be rushed, it must mature on its own. I take care of my process, and the process is starting to take care of me. I hope I can announce more results here soon, and more often (it embarrasses me to no end writing a blog about music with hardly any music in it... but, again, you cannot pull the flower).
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Nacho Jordi
I have a guitar and I'm gonna use it Archives
September 2018
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