The Light of Day

Cutting-edge systems
KeithHandy posted in Lists, Pretty Pix, Producing, Tools on August 8th, 2007

It’s hard to see in this picture, but in the seventh column, fourth row from the top, under “Sunset/Slab”, there is a post-it note. Remember when I said I wanted some way of keeping notes on all the songs I’m working on? A notebook didn’t completely make sense, because I never really know how much I’m going to need to write about any particular song, and there will either be wasted paper or not enough paper. Not like I have paper shortage issues, but yeah. And besides, I already have a great big BOX full of notebooks containing ideas, doodles, lyrics, algorithms, and rants (all of which I need to go through, armed with scissors and stapler, and do an intensive sorting — not to mention remember what the heck is in them, so that I can have all these epiphanies about the forgotten purpose of my life and whatnot), and the last thing I need is one more notebook to lose track of.

(Exhibit A: this is only about half of them; there are plenty more scattered throughout the studio.)

There will ultimately be post-it notes in most of the boxes on the whiteboard. I can use as many or as few as I need. When it’s time to dive into a song, I’ll peel off the sticky notes for that song and go “a-ha, I still need to [whatever] on this one!” They won’t necessarily be complete lists of everything that needs to be done, just reminders of whatever I was going to do next, before my ears got all burnt out. Then, when it’s time to put that song away and go to the next one, I take a few minutes to put up revised notes/ideas for the one I’m putting away and look at the most recent notes for the one I’m moving on to. And the fact that there’s this big, physical, visible thing greeting me every time I walk through the room will help to compensate for the “out of sight, out of mind” effect of having my digital data a little too nicely tucked away on the hard drive, so hopefully any given song won’t languish in some freakishly half-alive state for quite so long.

I’m still interested in a randomization system for picking out what to work on next (unless I’m already excited about doing something on a particular song). Maybe simple dice would do the trick, but in that case I should have made it a 6×6 grid… Also, I may use some of the empty rectangles for other projects, like coding or video stuff.

(In case you’re wondering, the orange thing at the base of the whiteboard is a “giggle stick” noise-making toy. Such sound-producing objects are important tools of the trade, though admittedly it’s not doing much good up at the whiteboard and I have no idea how it wound up there.)