The Light of Day

The almighty hour

I’m such an idiot. I keep telling myself I’m going to develop some time-management skills. But of course I never get around to this.

Think about it. Not enough time? Bullshit. What can I do in one hour?

I can do 15 complete takes of any instrumental part on a four-minute song. Okay, tack on another hour for hooking things up, adjusting the sound, and fiddling around with minor rewrites between takes. Maybe there’s a tricky bit that needs still another half hour to punch in correctly. Maybe all the takes are lame and I decide I’m going to sequence it instead, so what? Did I miss out on something during that time?

To follow that one up, I can whip up a rough sequence in Cakewalk. Or I can clean up an existing one. Or I can transfer a completed MIDI to audio and bring it into the rest of the song. Or I can edit and clean up tracks for one of the several dozen remixes sitting in limbo on my hard drive. I still have stuff on ADATs and even the quarter inch reels to transfer to the computer, for that matter.

Or I can start sampling a new instrument, maybe the guitar, or my voice, or various glass and metal objects around the apartment, to make new instruments on the computer. Or start searching for and collecting sound effects from the net.

I can get the bulk of one of my programming ideas into actual code. It probably won’t work the way I want it to right away, but it’s always a good learning experience. Tack on another hour (or seven) for tracking down that stupid elusive logistic error, or even a typo that magically makes total sense to the compiler and therefore none to me.

I can hack out a rough storyboard for my animation. It doesn’t have to be final; just something. I can scan in and clean up more of my drawings. I can do lip sync charts for any of my recorded songs.

My three-way relationship with creativity and time isn’t rocket surgery (ha ha, you thought I was going to say “science”). Basically, if I start, I keep going. So there’s that part of it; if I don’t start in the early part of whatever block of free time, I get lulled into wasting the rest of that block of time.

It’s very hard for me to shift gears.

And that’s important not just when I’m coming into free time, but when I’m coming into the diminishing-returns stage of actual creative work. If I manage to kick myself early on and get started on something, that will be the only thing I do that day. Which is why the whole “what can I do in an hour” question is so important. Most of these things that I could do in an hour, I start doing at the beginning of a free block of several hours, and keep pounding on for the entire block.

And of course I don’t want to short-change a task, especially if I’m in “the zone”. It’s key to differentiate between the zone and a rut. It’s not as glaring as you would think. Not for me, anyway.

I’d like to change my habits on this, though I don’t really know the best ways to make those changes last; maybe it’s just a matter of practicing a lot and getting into the habit. But I’d like to become a person who does maybe three things in those five or six hours, instead of just one thing. Certainly, exceptions can be made when I’m on a roll. But as it is now, doing more than one thing a day is the exception, and it shouldn’t be.

I’ll say one thing. Some people regard writing lists as a form of procrastination. This has not been my experience. I’m propelled by writing things down, even writing in this journal. It’s the first step to making something tangible. But so is any first step. What a list does for me is allows me to mentally “put away” the cloud of other ideas that are all clamoring for my attention. Seriously, I often feel weighted down by an overabundance of ideas. Sometimes I’ll have all these things I want to do, and each time I start to get serious about working on one, another will smoosh its face against the window and say “me me me”, and eventually the only way I can silence it all is to put them all off. Putting them all on paper, or erasable whiteboard, or a blog, lets me feel like they’re not being neglected when I focus in on just one.

Incidentally, this weekend and the few days prior, I have not done anything specifically for the Slab of Clay film. What I have been wasting many a good hour on is code for a graphic effect to create an animated reflection on a pair of mirror shades for my Tour Guide character, who doesn’t even appear in that song. And I’m still not happy with the effect I’m getting. This is why I should, at the very least, be multitasking. These are hours of my life passing by!

Leap of faith, get away from the noise

I need to write a little closer to daily, but I think what I’ve written so far has already helped me stay on track. It’s a sort of “leap of faith” that I’m setting out to systematically make this short animated film and break me out of my rut (of just being a musican that can’t manage to hold people’s attention over all the noise, more on that below) — faith in the sense that I have to put in a good stretch of unacknowledged work, stay on a single project (don’t jump around), and basically be in isolation, i.e. no feedback until I’m much much further along and have something impressive to show off. I’m kind of seeing it as going into a long tunnel. But I feel good about it.

I went to House of Guitars today for new bass strings just for Slab. Yeah, I decided to go all out on this remix, cough up the $20 and not just boil my old strings in water a fourth or fifth time. It’s kind of funny, at HoG there is a large cinderblock wall covered end-to-end and top-to-bottom with autographs. A sign in front of it says:

WALL OF ROCK STAR AUTOGRAPHS
DO NOT WRITE ON THIS WALL

I know enough about Aristotelean logic to know that translates into “YOU ARE NOT A ROCK STAR”. And I kind of feel like screaming at everybody there, of course you’re not a rock star, you’re in a sea of noise where no one can hear you. Look at all this noise … you’re putting your flyers up on walls covered with flyers for other bands, putting your CDs in stores where there are thousands of other CDs, submitting them to record companies that get thousands of demos a day, putting your band’s website on an internet with millions of other bands … that’s called noise, don’t you get it? If you want to make a dent in the world, you have to get away from the noise.