(A few notes on the current state of my music making, mostly to put my thoughts in order but of course you're invited to read in case there's someone out there.)
------- Sometimes I feel like I'm a tool, a "transmitter" for all those songs who want to be born into the world. This would explain how a rare delicate creature like me, against all odds, has made it to his forties in the middle of this ugly rotten dumpster called human kind. I'm somehow kept around because "I'm useful" (from my human point of view it is called "motivation"). The day all of the songs have been put out there, are living their own life, I will be discarded like an empty pod. If such poetic premises happen to be true, I have to hurry a bit more or I'm going to live 1,000 years or so... But I prefer to think about all the advance I've already made, something that we often tend to forget, always on to the next thing, the next moving goal. My previous main hurdle was that I couldn't mix my songs, for not having the minimum equipment necessary to do it reliably, and incapable of providing myself it because I was living in the middle of nowhere, with tremendous material difficulties (think limited food and water supplies). Now I'm in a new location where those problems are solved; I've already got myself the minimum reliable headphones I needed for mixing (yeah, I know what all those excellent luminaries that flood the internet say about mixing with headphones, but I don't have a stable place to put my stuff in, you see, so everything I have must be ultra-portable). Two songs are right now in the pipeline for mixing, and will be published at some point not very far in time (as long as I remember not to go too Frusciante on things). Circumstances are far from ideal, and as I discussed before my mixing fuse is short, but not a single day goes by without having some kind of advance, so I'm happy. However, it seems that the amount of bullshit in the universe is constant, so solving the mixing problems has now been replaced by a different kind of challenge... (OK, scrap that, let's put it in a different way: maybe the shitstorm I'm going through with my gear is layer after layer of karma accumulated during my first 20 years of life, when I didn't give a damn about gear. Solved that previous layer of karma with the headphones, now it's time to dissolve this one, and I'll reach a new level of stability -hopefully karma events are one-offs-, on to my True North goal of "launching one song a day, with punk-rock album quality".) Here's the new hurdle: besides those two songs in mixing stage, there are other two where I have to record again one voice and one guitar track respectively. After that, they go to mixing, mastering, and the album is done. But I've found that this new location where I'm now is like the Mecca of electromagnetic vibration. My two audio cards are USB powered, and I get whining USB vibration sounds in all tracks. I've tried a different laptop, and the result is the same. I've researched devices that cancel USB vibration, and found two kinds: a) the cheap model, whose manufacturers warn that does not work in audio interfaces with preamps that take energy supply solely from the USB (my case exactly). b) the expensive ones, silly solution because they would cost more than my audio interfaces themselves, plus with ground loops it is always a shot in the dark; maybe I go through the whole irritating process of purchase and delivery only to find that nothing changes (and then I would have to go through the irritating process of refund, etc...) Add to that that my laptop does not have Firewire ports (and it remains to be seen that Firewire would cancel the noises better), so the perspective of manning up and getting a better audio interface isn't viable, either; what's the point of higher audio quality if at the end of the road nothing assures me that I'm going to get rid of that damn USB buzzing that sends all takes to waste? So I'm studying options, there are still a few more things I can try, although all are remedial solutions by now, and it depresses me not being able to reach the minimum stability I need to just go to what is the actual value creation part for me: singing my heart out, more expressive, more content, more and better energy. Anyways, I remember that saying of "act in every situation as if you had actually chosen it", and for example, this irritating phenomenon has taken me to the gates of my first, rudimentary knowledge of electronics, something that I've always wanted to know more about. The album will go out at some point, one way or another, and in the end once they are out not even you the author remember all the effort behind those dreamy snippets of 2-5 minutes. Sigh.
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Nacho Jordi
I have a guitar and I'm gonna use it Archives
September 2018
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