As an artist I was attracted to social media before there was social media.  A good 10 or 15 years ago I was moving in a direction that had to do with my belief of where things were going.  This seems hyper mysterious to me today:  It means that there’s a broad set of issues related to art in social media today, that I’ve been exploring for the last 10 or 15, or maybe even more, years.  Someday I’ll really take you on the journey into all that, but for now….

Let me share with you parts of the plan I’ve been working on since I was in high school.. early 90s, late 80s:  

#1 Do everything:

The idea was that there were all these pieces to the puzzle, and your job is to learn about all the pieces.  What this means is you don’t limit your self so much..  It means you say “why yes, I could be a carpenter” and “why yes, I could be an astrophysicist.”  What defines your skill sets should now be internal rather then external:  They should be your passions!  Your passions organically link your potential with where you are going and how you are evolving.

This idea is very much in keeping with the DIY (do it your self) zeitgeist of social media.  The difference, maybe, is that if you spend 19 years going in this kind of a direction you’re not so much the amateur / folk artist, you’re really in a much more pro space.

The suggestion that you should “do everything” is not always 100% advised.  It is perhaps best to team up with someone who’s good at the stuff you’re not as good at, but then social media is a world of relationships, thus the “social” in “social media,” which if nothing else, means we ought to be playing well together.  The other issue is that the amount of time it takes to “get good at everything” is a good deal more then what it takes to get good at “one thing.”  So somewhere in here there must be a balancing act made.

But maybe the point here is that the lines that articulate your area of specialization ought to be organically linked to your potential, not to what the market place is talking about.  It also means that the puzzle has to do with all that it takes to be successful in this space,  and if you’re able to have all those pieces worked out in one brain you’re able to think about all of this stuff in very holistic ways.

#2 Business strategy and the art should not be compartmentalized as different areas:

This is maybe a radical idea but the point is that within the art it’s self are market issues.  These market issues, like the extent to which media aesthetics are a crystallization of market forces, are often dealt with by artists in an intuitive and not always 100% conscious way.

Further, if you look at the history of the relationship between art an commerce, the business of culture creation has mostly always been a mass media idea of business, which then defines what has “commercial potential.”  It is common for cultural critics to talk about this problem as “the expression of market morality on culture.”  What I propose to you is, and especially in the social media context, that it is often the wrong question to ask “does this have commercial potential,”  the right question is probably, “what is the business approach that is right for this.”

When you contemplate this, it then makes sense for “a part of the art” to be what it’s relationship to the market place ought to be.  This is in part a cultural critique, and thus it seems that this should be explored.

When you look at social media you will find that there are a whole lot of “best practices” that are a part of good social media strategy.  A question you might then ask is “what are the cultural, or other, implications of these best practices.”  If, for you, art is more important then the commerce side of the equation then: you’re work, your pr and marketing efforts, and everything else, should reflect this understanding.

So that’s probably enough for now.  At this point I should plug The Asymmetric Biz Cult Podcast: A New Philosophy of Art Mind and Business,  which is a place where I really explore these kinds of ideas.

I’m agonizing over Steve Job’s Keynote tomorrow at MacWorld.  What are the chances that the Mac Book Pro will get updated, and if not should I buy a MacBook Pro anyway or buy a Mac Pro?  I hate to buy a new computer at the end of its life cycle!  So I feel as though I have a bet riding on this one.

On Twitter today, Christopher Penn posted a link to a rummer about what’s Steve Jobs’s presentation will look like.  The story goes that Steve Job’s Keynote Script was leaked today to Wikipedia, and the above link is to a version of said script.  As Chris himself said on Twitter “I’m sure there’s plenty of falsehood. Still, it’s fun reading while we wait for the real keynote.”  

No Chris, its not fun at all!  According to the leak there will be no MacBook Pro released, though there will be a new Mac MacBook.  The new MacBook is to be completely redesigned, and if the leaked script is to be believed, it’s pretty amazing:  13″ screen, .8″ thin, iSight HD (720p) Intel GMA X3100 graphics, and the drive can be maxed out at 320 GB.  

Does this really make sense?  Well, this would make the consumer level MacBook in some ways more powerful then the top of the current top of the like MacBook Pro.. ($1119 as compared to upwards of $3000) Examples of how the consumer laptop would be more powerful include the iSight that would now be in high definition, and that you could get a significantly bigger internal hard drive.  This would seem to not make a lot of sense in that, if you’re Apple, you want to give people more reasons to spend more money, not less money.  So if Apple where to do this there’s good reason to expect a new MacBook Pro soon..  accept would you put out a significant redesign at a time that wasn’t at a big conference?  I suppose they did that with the iMac?  But if you do a significant redesign of the consumer level stuff, do you not need to follow that with a significant redesign of the pro stuff?

What is also a bit silly is that the script claims that the Mac Pro will be refreshed.. which of course is terribly unlikely as Apple just refreshed the Mac Pro a couple days ago.

So ok.. I guess Chris is right, this is kinda fun…  *sigh* 

Matt’s Expectations:

Well the Mac Pro comment sorta discredits the script for me, though I must tell you that whoever wrote the script did a hell of a job making it really feel like a Steve Job’s Keynote..  It’s an accurate depiction of how Steve presents stuff, and sorta pokes fun of Steve in the process.. sorta deconstructs the hype a bit if you like.  

I figure the odds of a MacBook Pro update are probably around 50/50.  I think if the MacBook gets updated, which is pretty likely, then there’s a pretty good chance that the MacBook Pro will get a little update, if for no other reason then just to make it a little more powerful then the Mac Book, on all fronts.

What shall I ever do?:

I feel as though I have 3 options if the MacBook Pro isn’t updated: #1 Buy the MacBook Pro anyway, #2 Wait for a new MacBook Pro, or #3 Buy a new Mac Pro and too hell with laptops!  Well see what I do, more story as it unfolds (I got some more stuff on related subjects in draft form)

Indra’s Net, is of course some music I made some years ago.  I find myself showing it to people, listening to it, and reflecting on it.  It’s not my latest work, that would be Zar Matt A Thustra’s Deep Space Adventures.  Indra’s net is probably more representative of things to come inso far as ZarMattAThustra’s Deep Space Adventures was rushed to be put together..  and is..  more experimental, and made with different tools on a weaker computer.  Though I imagine my next work will be something of a combination of the positives of these things.

Of course you can find both CD’s for free by clicking here.  And I invite you to comment back here your thoughts on it.

Indra’s Net is a crazy piece of work.  It’s ambient electronic music of a sort unlike anything you’ve heard before.  (Which is not to say that it is without aggressive moments.)  It takes you into these alien worlds.. places unlike any place you’ve ever been to before.  It is a hypnotic trip of the mind.   

In the story of my work it represents a huge step forward from my Viveka project (which you can currently only hear parts of, for free online) in that it is a quantum leap forward in terms of the tools I was using.  At least in terms of the digital instruments, Indra’s Net is uncompromising.  But the full breadth of what they are capable of was not realizable on the system I was using.  

And this is what brings me to the day dreams about a new project:

1.  On the old system you had limited processor power.. and one of the places this effects is your ability to create an ambient space inside of which the music happens.  Reverb tends to be a computationally expensive effect, especially convolution reverb.  A part of making a mix, that sounds like it has a lot of depth, will involve creating multiple layers of reverb, sometimes EQ’d and compressed in different ways.. where instruments are placed into those spaces in varying degrees.  For the sort of work I’m doing you’d see these instruments and sounds moving in and out of those spaces.  Some of the tracks on Indra’s Net have very little of this going on due to how much power the instruments took up.
2.  Because you have a very limited amount of power you tend to be very judicious in how you place effects on instruments..  I suppose this goes with #1.  The implication is that stuff doesn’t always get crafted as much as you might like.
3.  I have a lot of new tools.  I think most of Indra’s Net was done with Komplete 2, and I’m at least on 3 now, plus Kore.   Some of the software of Komplete 3 wouldn’t even run on the old system, never mind run well.  In addition to this I’m now working with new versions of Reason (Reason wasn’t even used on Indra’s Net) and Ableton Live.  So this represents a huge kind of technological leap forward.. particularly when used on a system that can handle all this.

So all of this represents an evolution in the production tools.  Beyond this we also have me at a much more sophisticated place in terms of my production and mixing skills, and there are certain point in the Indra’s mix that I’m not 100% happy with.

Latter that day:

As I sit here writing this, I wonder what is likely to come.  We are days away from MacWorld where new equipment is likely to be unveiled.  If the Mac Pro line gets a bump I will surely buy that, other wise there’s at least some chance I might go with the new Mac Pro.  I’m currently in the process of doing research into the various tools I’m working with to see what sorta multi core support they might have, to get a feel for what difference a Mac Pro might mean to my work.  Is a Mac Book Pro “good enough?” What’s the power difference between a Mac Book Pro and a Mac Pro look like?

In my mind Mac Pro = uncompromising power.  Uncompromising power = Amazing possibilities.  But what’s in my mind, and what exactly might be real are probably two distinct things.  I have a will to ‘kinda sorta over do it.’  What I’d like to do is plop down another $450 for the Komplete 5 upgrade, and then another $700 or so for Liquid mix, and go from there.  But spending that sorta money isn’t sanity, even if it would do wonders for my work.  It would make sense if some label came up to me and offered me some sorta contract that including some sort of an advance, or it would make sense if I had some kind of income going on, but for the moment, we must hold back.

It’s ok though, because we are talking about something amazing without even going that far, so let us try to explore some this:

Conventionally I have a limited number of instruments I’m able to work with at anyone time, as well as a limited number of effects.  While this is still to be the case, the limitations are no where near so stringent..  Which means we can enter into more complex soundscapes.  Imagine if you will..  a complex arsenal of sounds.  This is a production process that would take a good deal more labor per second of audio then Indra’s Net..  But imagine you have all these sounds.  Just because it leaps into my mind, imagine you have an orchestra.  Given, this is a somewhat limited orchestra, but imagine its there.  Our orchestra is playing something..  The composition has complex interrelationships of performance dynamics, to such an extent that it can remind you of a real orchestra playing the great classical music of a great composer.   Not only this but our orchestra is a microtonal orchestra.  There is an expressive quality to the music, that as a result of the microtonalism, simply makes us feel as if we are in a world with a greater tonal fidelity then anything we’ve heard before.

Ok great..  Now imagine it really sounds like we are in a real concert hall.  But that’s not all.. Imagine the music is a 5.1 Surround Sound Mix, and we are in the middle of the sound.  The orchestra is, in mix engineer language, on a virtual sound stage in front of us.  It sounds more or less real, and we are captivated by it.  This until the reality goes too far:

Somewhere behind us, somewhat faintly in the background, we being to hear the whispers of a conversation.  Out of this conversation emerges a fight.  All the people around the fight are great disturbed by the fight, by it getting in the way of hearing the performance, and then before we know it, security is called in.  Imagine, if you will, that this was something like an audio play.. something you weren’t really expecting.  We, after all, thought we came to listen to the music!

The next thing you know we are following our fighting couple as they get thrown out of the hall.  So that the 5.1 Mix takes us through the crowd, and out side..  As we travel out, the orchestra moves further away from us..  and the acoustic space of the where we are, changes to suit where we are..  And there’s a suitable level of sound design to reinforce all this.  The sound design is a kind of composition.  A composition that plays with the ambiguity as to wether we should interpret it as noise, sound design, or composition… but tries to be read, if you’re reading superficially, as the sound of the environment.

Now what of these characters we are following, what’s there story?  Hell, what’s our story, why are we following them?  

Out side on the street we can hear cars driving buy, often with stereos blaring.  Each one represents a different sonic cluster, should we call it.  Another words the stereos superficially mimmic different styles of music..  metal, hip hop, whatever. And in a Charles Ives sorta way, as they move around in space.. there music links up with each other..  so that we might hear as a kind of whole.. Wizing around the streets… as we move through the streets.

Ok, lets stop this right hear.  I don’t know that I would ever try to make music like this.. It at least sounds interesting on the level of an idea, but who knows what happens when we try and execute it.  One of the ideas I think of as I write about it is the idea that we could have a range between realism and formalism.  Another words, at what point do the sounds sound real, the space sound real, like we are really in it..  And then at what point is, as if on some sorta acid trip, melt into some other reality?  The other reality was there all along after all, just masquerading as a more conventional reality.  Perhaps the music is an investigation of metaphysical presumptions, or perhaps the unconscious in everyday life?

What I’m describing to you is sorta how my music works..  Though we are not normally in settings that sound so… specific or like a known reality.

One thought I had while imagining this was “what if we scored the story?”  Another words, ok, you have an orchestra over there, and then you have this fight over there, and then we are over here, and all around us are the people of the audience.  What if we scored these stories.  How might the orchestra react to this going on in its midst?   

A few latter:

I don’t know that that story really describes where I really see my music going.  Technology is really only one small part of it..  And in the end its more about creativity and ideas.

Do you mind if I speak with some arrogance?  If you’re reading this you probably fall into one of two camps:

1. You never heard of me in your life.
2. You’ve met me, but don’t really know too much about me, or about what sorta work I might do.

Depending on the camp you fit into..  Well I have no idea…  and you might not be coming from a place where what I’m doing makes any sense..  I mean I think there are some people for whom my work clicks, and others for whom it doesn’t.  I’m afraid that what I’m about to say might sound terribly arrogant to the first group..  

I think this music kicks ass.  I think it kicks ass on a level that is far beyond conventional ass kicking.. I mean I think we have a certain set of expectations that we have of work we find in our culture.. a range if you will.. at the top of which is “kick ass” and I think this stuff is a little off the charts. 

So far I’ve blogged very little about my music..  Not really enough so that you’d really get deep into what its really all about..  Hell I haven’t blogged too much at all yet.  I’m just trying to get used to blogging via wordpress..  out in the open.  But I promise you this.. if you stick with me..  I’ll show you some serious ass kicking like you never saw before.  I know from the surface it might not look like that at all.. like you could expect such a thing.. but trust me..  beneath the surface, tucked away in a secret compartment somewhere.. are the tools of ass kicking.  Right now I’m just sorta fooling around..  but soon… shit will fly!

LOL which still doesn’t get at it, ha?  But to really get to it is going to take a lot of blogging on my part. We are going to have to explore a lot of different subjects together.  I have some idea.. a kind of philosophy.. lots of people have there philosophies.. and I don’t know if I can really call my self a philosopher or not..  but I have some amazing ideas.  I have ideas that could change the way you think.  I have ideas that could open you to whole new worlds.. whole new ways of experiencing life.  These are my gold.  And with them I hope to knock your socks off.  

So I guess we should start by talking about what Indra’s Net is.   You can hear this music by going to mattsearles.com/music or, at least in the short run, on my Virb.com/mattsearles profile.  It’s also worth mentioning that it’s both free, pod safe, and creative commons 3.1 share alike with attribution.. so use it for whatever, just give me attribution.. and if you want to use it for some sort of commercial thing, shoot me an email so we can talk about.  

A New Kind of Music 

Indra’s Net is my attempt at making a new kind of music, or it’s one such attempt.  I think of my music as a kind of radicle leap out of the worlds of conventional music, or any sort of music I’ve encountered anywhere else, and its that leap that I find most exciting about it.

Indra’s Net is ambient electronic music, I think its safe to say.  Or if it fits into any genera, that’s probably where it fits. But that doesn’t really get to it.

In many ways music bares the mark of the process that creates it: electronic music and working on a computer can have a big effect on process.  I think of my process of composition and production as being a combination of painting and film making:  A moment in the composition is like creating a painting, and the mix is like moving a camera through a painting..  a painting that it’s self is a living moving thing.

The ambience is like the atmosphere of a space, of a world.  The composition operates on on principles of.. well this deep sort of psychology / philosophy framework of understanding reality.  It’s a little like looking beyond or beneath reality’s surface. 

On top of this you have a kind of surrealistic like process.  You make a mark on a canvass, and like staring up at a cloud, you ask “what am I seeing.”  From here the process becomes a kind of dialog between artist and an emerging dream:  The artist is a facilitator.  So the result is a kind of investigation of the unconscious.  Its an inward exploration. 

To make things even more interesting there is the issue of the relationship between composition and production:  The mix is a part of the composition.  In mix engineering you create a virtual sound stage where in each sound or instrument has a specific location in space, and along with this different instruments are isolated into there own frequency space which has some effect on where you place those instruments / sounds in space.  In my work the location of sounds and instruments, as well as there frequency space, tends to be in a constant state of flux.  So even as we have this experience of a point of view moving through a sonic space, we have the experience of elements of that space moving around..

This is interesting from a traditional compositional point of view:  The harmonic make up of a moment has to do with the sum of all sounds.. but here harmony gets spacialized.  We have harmony that comes out of a kind of modalism, as in Jazz, where parts move in and out of key, in such a way to suggest alternative harmonic structures.  When this takes place in space our notion of harmony is shifted.

Another thing that might be worth touching on is microtonalism.  Conventionally 99.9% of all the music you ever heard in your life is based on a 12 tone equal temperament system.  Working with microtonalism means that we leave conventional harmonic / melodic stuff behind.  Where this is perhaps most interesting comes at the subject of tonal and atonal music.  Atonalism and tonalism are like these two monsters movements in music history.  One of the ways I use microtonalism is to create a music that has a kind of figure ground ambiguity in relationship to tonalism and atonalism.

So this is how it works:  Serial atonalism is sorta an atonal convention, where you could avoid creating a tonal center via not repeating a note until the other 11 notes have played, as well as not emphasizing a note over the others.  From a process perspective composing atonal music this way can feel a little like a mathematical exercise.  But one could interpret this pattern as “maximizing the length of time before a note is repeated.”  If you are working in a microtonal tone space, where perhaps you’re dealing with 72 or more notes, one can maximize the time before repeating a note without bothering to think about it too much. Further, you could compose traditional tonal music.. diatonic harmony style… but then bend the pitches around microtonal wise, so that what you would hear is like tonal music on acid.. ultimately atonal.. but in such a way that you could perceive it as ether tonal or atonal.  In this way you are exploring where certain traditional ideas about music, musical composition, and music theory, break down.

The notion of figure ground ambiguity is another theme we pick up.  In part we are saying that context provides meaning, both in terms of time, and in terms of harmony..  reality is in some sense a constructed thing, and we are exploring how reality gets constructed.  We have multiple pathways through the music, each with moments that can be interpreted in one or another way, so that one could listen to the same track multiple times and hear it differently each time.. 

The problems with Indra’s net

Indra’s Net was produce on a cheap / free laptop.  Yuck!  Which adversely effects things.  The bigger issue is the head phones I was working with:  The head phones give you a full dynamic range, plus they make higher frequency noises sound louder then they are.  This latter point has the advantage of giving a more acute sense of spacial location while mixing, but there’s also a down side:  You tend to mix sounds in such a way that they are not as loud as you might other make them, since you are living in a fuller dynamic range, and because certain things sound louder then they are.  The results was certain elements of the production endoing up sounding too quite / you are not able to hear them on certain systems.  The last problem of Indra’s Net is, because the lap top I created it on had no disk space, all the track got rendered out as MP3 files.  Latter I’d try to render the tracks out of Cubase as uncompressed files, but some of the renderings didn’t work since different versions of Cubase where used and some of the effects of older versions where not present in newer version of Cubase.

So to correct these problems I loaded the files into audio programs and rendered them out louder and with more dynamic compression.. making them finally loud enough.  The trouble was that the origional files I was working from where MP3 files, making them sound a little crummy in some places.

Further Reading on Indra’s Net

Around the time I created Indra’s Net (a long long time ago) I blogged about its creation and ideas.  Here are some links to those old entries:

• Thinkers and Indra’s Net: Arthor Schopenhaur

• Inventing a New Music

• A Most Terrible Happening (More Stuff on the Net of Indra Project)

• More Future Thinking in the (Sound?) Work of Matt

• A Modest Evolution in the Indra’s Net Project

• Indra’s Net Notes Part 2: Electric Metal

• Indra’s Net Essay (part 1)

• Indra’s Net.. to come out in SACD format (someday)

It looks like had Apple announced a new Mac Pro, click here to see for your self.  It’s been, what, 2 years?  I mean since Apple really updated the Mac Pro?  Here’s the basic gist of the upgrade, as I understand it now:  8 cores is now a part of the standard configuration, the architecture on everything from processors, to memory, to PCI cards, and even the case has been updated.  Apple is also offering us new graphics card options.

The following article is more or less part 2 of Upgrading the old Sound Studio and Media Studio.  So check that out for further reading.

The Mac Pro is the serious uncompromising work station Mac.  You don’t buy a Mac Pro unless you really need one..  well unless you have money to burn, these suckers are expensive after all!  That said they do have a longer shelf life then a portable, and are cheeper to upgrade then anything else on the Mac line… so it might be arguable that from certain perspectives the Mac Pro isn’t really as expensive as it seems on the surface, and not only that but.. if you do the sort of work that needs a hell of a lot of power, where the time it takes to complete computationally expensive tasks has a direct impact on how much work you can get done in X time period..  then obviously more power is cheaper then less power.

As it turns out I’m in the market for a new computer, so I’ve been researching Apples various offerings for the past month or so. Indeed I tend to know what’s going on with the Apple line even if I’m not in the market for one..  but.  I’ve more or less settled into the idea of buying a top of the like Mac Book Pro, and I’m waiting for Mac World (only days away) to make my final decision, just in case they something I might want gets updated.  Apple announcing prior to Mac World a Mac Pro update has me doing some new calculous, so lets take a little look at that calculous:

In terms of what I want Mac Pro kinda power for..  We are mainly talking about sound and video production, with maybe some motion graphics and possibly some 3D graphics thrown in for good measure.  It’s within the realm of possibility that I could end up going in a more video production orientated direction then I’m currently expecting, and so for these reason processor power and graphics power are kind of important to me.

When you buy a Mac Pro you generally custom configure it.  So the question is, what sorta custom configuration do I want?  Here’s the configuration I’d probably go with: 2.8  GHz, 2GB RAM.. The default configuration comes with a 320 GB hard drive that I’d probably stick with and just add more drives as I go along.  I say this though that 320 GB drive can be upgraded to a 500 GB drive for $100 is something I’d at least look at. On the Graphics card front I’m thinking the NVIDA GeForce 8800 GT with 512 MB of RAM, to say nothing of duel DVI, for an extra $200 is probably the way to go.  I’m not 100% sure about displays but I figure you gotta have a 32″ HD display.  The question is do you go through Apple or Dell?  Prices on 32″ HD displays seem to range from between $1,400 and $2000.. For our purposes lets say we go through Apple for $1,800.  Beyond this Apple has some printers that with rebates that can come to free or $30 or more.  Lets not add that to the bill at this time.. just for simplicity sake.  Finally, on a desktop unit I figure I don’t really need an Apple protection Plan..  

The final price is about $4,600.  This before I start updating software…  The Mac Book Pro on the other hand; with an updated hard drive, monitor resolution, Air Port Express Base station, and extended service agreement comes out to almost $3,600.  Is a Mac Pro worth $1000 more to me then the Mac Book Pro?  The price difference of $1000 can pretty much be attributed to the cost of the monitor.  I suppose it’s entirely reasonable that I could buy a monitor for the Mac Pro that costs $700 or less, making the Mac Pro cost equal or less then the Mac Book Pro.   Now lets look at some of the pros and cons:

Are the advantages of portability worth the power difference?  

What attracts me to portability is the following advantages: 

1.  You have a portable studio meaning I can go and do sound, or any other sorta work, anywhere.  This is pretty huge, and a mega plus for projects involving collaboration.
2. I can do live events.  If the events are DJ-ing, involve playing my guitar, playing a keyboard or using my studio, I can play out.  Also if I want to give presentations that require a computer with which to present off of..  I can do that.
3. Being able to work anywhere means I’m not stuck in this room anymore.. I can go down stairs, I can work in bed, I can work in a coffee house, on a plain, whatever.  (I know this is pretty close to #1 but it does seem different somehow)   

The advantages of the Pro: 

We are talking about a 30″ HD display on the Mac Pro versus the equivalent of a 23″ HD display on the Mac Book Pro.  On the Mac Pro we have both a better graphics card and twice the video RAM..  we have 8 2.8 GHz cores on two processors versus 2 2.4 GHz cores on 1 processor on the Mac Book Pro… And of course we can upgrade the RAM for relatively cheap on the Mac Pro.

It’s not totally clear to me what the performance differences between these 2 machines likely is. My guess is the stats of the Mac Pro make it sound a lot more powerful then it probably is in reality, depending on what your trying to do with it.  Or perhaps I should say it makes it seem like the performance difference between these computers is more then it likely is.  8 cores does not equal 4 times the performance of 2 cores, even if each of those 8 cores is marginally faster then your 2 cores.  The truth of the matter is the more cores you add the less per core performance gains you get, so when you get into the 8 core world you’re not really taking advantage of the extra power so much.  I say this even as both the processor architecture of the Mac Pro system has been revised and the new Leopard operating system takes better advantage of multi cores. The truth is that I don’t really know what the implications of these changes would mean in reality.

In the end I think you come out on the side of “well look, what do you want to do, and what are your values in this matter?”  Personally I’m sort of torn.  I know that many of the advantages of portability are critical to what I want to be doing in the next year or two, but I also like having a lot of power on my desktop, and I like the kind of productivity enhancement that such a system can offer.  When I think of the sorts of things I’m likely to use my computer for over the coming couple of years, I don’t see any reason why I can’t make do with the power of a Mac Book Pro.  

But as I say this a strange idea comes to mind.  What if I got a Mac Pro now, and then maybe a year or so down the line got some sort of Mac Book.. just a low end sorta portable?  In this case your talking about shit productivity, where an awful lot of the sorts of things you’d like to do you couldn’t really.. or you couldn’t do it well enough to make it worth doing on the portable.. but you could certainly use it for live performance stuff, internet stuff, and to a limited extent collaborative stuff.  Granted, $1099 is nothing to sneeze at, but you figure you’d want to upgrade your system in a couple years anyway..  

I guess what I’m trying to get at is there’s a lot of ways to look at this. 

I’m just waking up, its about 10 35 am as I write these lines.  Yesterday I went to a Boston Media Makers meeting, always a lot of fun, and a friend asked me how I was doing.  As I described my efforts at trying to get back on my feet, the feed back I got was along the lines of “I don’t know how I could do that so soon.”  As I thought about it I  began to see my situation in a new light:

Mark lent me a book on grieving that I would dip into a little that night.  What I then realized was…  how kind of strange my way of dealing probably was compared to..  I don’t know, the norm?

My mom was first diagnosed with cancer, I’m not even sure but I think.. about 10 or so years ago?  That news hit me hard in the gut and sorta woke me up to the mortality of lifet.  To one extent or another I’ve probably been preparing to loose my mom since that day.  I know “you can never be prepared to loose your mom,” but..  you can build a psychological attitude that might carry you through it. 

So when I say preparing I’m not even talking, necessarily, about a conscious enterprize.   I mean we could talk about something as simple as what you are attracted to as far as books, music, movies, or what sort of things start to occupy your mind.  I mean look, you know she’s not going to be with you forever, you know that day is coming… and the question is, when that day comes, how are you going to cope with it?

So, when Beth knocked on the door to tell my father and I that my mom had died, when we drove to the hospital and I then saw my mom’s dead body….  my reaction was….  well how do you put that into words?  Maybe listen to my last podcast recorded an hour or two after that hospital visit!  

But what I was thinking in my head was like “Matt this is real, you’re going to have to accept this, your life will be forever very different and your job now is to cope with this.”  

The first week was insanely difficult: sadness gripping your body, shaking your soul, feeling like you are somehow reaching beyond the world of the living with your sadness..  Like somehow your grief is transcending time and space and..  I don’t want to say you are renouncing life..  but you do see life in a different light.  Normally we don’t think about this sorta thing but look: #1 We are all on this planet for a short time, and #2 Everyone whom we really bond with, really love, will one day loose us or we will lose them…  and this is life!  

Somehow that short window of life seems less important.  Our lives, what meaning can you make out of them?  They are our joyful participation in the sorrows of life?  It’s a little dance we do with creation, for a time?   When life seems so small in the scheme of things..  and your tears are still reaching out.. where at this order of magnitude for how you are thinking about anything.. nothing really matters anymore..  but way out here you’re mom still matters. You still love your mom, and you’re still crying out for her, to her, and of her.

This sorta thing lends perspective to life like nothing else I can think of. Here’s a question for you: “What’s really important?”  The answer seems to be love..  I mean if your love for your mom matters beyond so much.. you see the love you have for any number of things.. people, whatever.. as sorta meaning more then anything else.

A couple hours latter:

So I mean isn’t that beautiful?  To look at life and think that love is the most important thing?  This way of thinking about life, this sorta psychological attitude, is not one that leads to waist lands.. this leads to lives worth living.

Creeping up on 3:30:

To bring this more down to earth there’s all this stuff I should be doing today, it’s late afternoon, and I still haven’t been able to bring myself to do that stuff.  My reaction to this is to not be too terribly happy with myself…  But when I think about what I’m going through, I guess I should be more forgiving of myself?  I don’t know, but I do need to get to work..  At least posting this will be something. 

My mom died Sunday, December 9th 2007, just shy of 1 AM.  I, and my father, found out around 2AM when Beth, a close friend to my mom, woke us up and took us to the hospital to see my mom.  When I got home I recorded this episode.

The approach I’ve been taking to podcasting has been a little bit on the experimental side..  I’m still sorta struggling to find my way to a mature vision so this episode is sorta exploring our way towards that:

I record stuff, put the stuff on my hard drive, and when I go to make a new episode, I take stuff from the growing collection of recordings on the hard drive.  

 From an aesthetic / philosophy of art sorta perspective I’m thinking in somewhat radical ways:  There’s this old idea of a recording as “a record.”  That is a recording as a record of an event, a recording having something to do with something that “actually happened.”  Modern sound production is not about creating “a record,” what you hear is “something manufactured.”  There’s a lot of implications to these two different ways of doing things.. which I’m always exploring..

Deep inside the subject of “a recording” is the idea that the microphone could be a kind of surrogate for Freud:  In classic psychoanalysis Freud sits you down on his coach and you talk..  and eventually we are able to peer into your soul, into the unconscious.  This is one of the ramifications of the “record” approach.

So here we have a recording, of where I was at, just a few short hours after my mom’s death:  Here we have a record of a psychological state.  

One thing, from an artist’s perspective, I find interesting about this recording is the difference between “in the moment,” when it was recorded versus “in reflection,” when editing.  In the moment you’re often thinking “I must make this worth listening to” and you have various judgments your making about the value of what you’re doing that is based on the perspective of the moment….

 I can tell you that 4 hours after my mom died I did not have a lot of perspective!  For about one or two weeks after my mom died I probably didn’t have anything going through my mind but dealing with my mom’s death.  Now that I have a little bit of psychological distance from the moment of the recording (though not really that much) I can see that it’s an intensely powerful recording / moment.  But in the moment I wasn’t even sure of the value of recording it.

I ended up not recording too much during that intense first week or so.. I have a recording made after the first wake:  My mom was big on going to the local 99.  I had always had a sort of snobby attitude towards the 99, didn’t like the food so much, and I guess I’m sorta… I don’t know.. the sort of people who go there aren’t really my people..  But the people who go to that 99 where the people who loved my mom, and so it was sort of an amazing experience to go there after the wake..  all of us sitting at the table.. all the toasts to my mom..  And I found myself feeling sorta attached to the 99 crowd…  

I’m not really sure how to wrap this sorta thing into the podcast, or even if I will, but I have it..  Something interesting to take a listen to. 

 

 MS Episode 11: A few Hours After My Mom Left [14:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’m finally in a position to upgrade the old studio.  Finally!  

Some of this might be a reaction to the emotional impact of loosing my mom along with the feeling that the limitations of my studio has been one of the biggest thing holding me back for the last few years..  This mixed with the need to get some place fast, the some place being deeply related to the idea of gainful employment.  What exactly is pushing me in what direction is worth thinking about as when one spends a lot of money one likes to feel like one is making the right decisions.  All that said, shall we explore the studio upgrade decisions?

The way I approach the question of studio upgrades is to start with a studio map.  A studio map is like asking where you want to be in 5 or 10 years.  The question is what tools do you need in order to get where you want to go and how much will it cost to get there.  Of course you can’t really see what technology will look like 5 or 10 years down the road and prices do fluctuate.  You can, however, look at what’s out now, have a general sense of where the technology is going, and kinda sorta map things out that way.  A big part of this sorta thing is that at any given point in time you have X amount of money to invest towards those end goals, when you invest X you want to make X go as far as you possibly can make X go, and you want the most bang for your bug towards going where you wanna go.  And you sorta balance these things.

So where does Matt want to go?  In my studio I want to be able to do 3D graphics and animation, video production, music production, graphics, interactive design, photography, social media stuff, and the list probably goes on and on.  Of that whole, what do I want to explore in the short term? Maybe the better way to ask this is..  what do I need versus what do I want?  Or maybe its a question of where the market is and how can I get myself well positioned in that market in the shortest possible time, this with an eye to where my current skills, knowledge base, at talent lye.

 So lets start with Music Production:

1.  Acoustic Treatment:  In the room you mix in, do serious sound work in, it is critically important that when listening to what you’ve recorded / constructed, that you hear what you’re making as uncolored as possible.  Another words you want to hear what you’ve recorded, not the acoustic ramifications of the space you’re recording in.  My guess is that this will run me between $1K, and $2K, and its something I might want to wait till I’m in a space that I’m not planning on moving out of in the short term…  I’m looking at Real Traps for this.
2. Monitors: This is to say speakers that don’t color the sound you’re listening to.  I currently have a THX 5.1 monitor system which is wonderful for doing 5.1 mixing on, but probably not ideal for doing stereo mixing on.  THX is a standard that comes from our friend George Lucas, which roughly translates that all THX systems should sound more or less the same..  Thus having a THX system to mix for something that would play back on a THX system.. is pretty ideal…  But getting something ideal together for stereo mixing is still something to be looked at.  The Monitor upgrade will probably cost me at least $500.
3. Computer Upgrades:  Ok, I’m on an intolerably old system, its time to upgrade, Period.  I’ll talk more about this at the end of this blog entry.
4. Orchestral Sample Libraries:  Orchestral sample libraries allow you to emulate symphonic orchestras, and if you’re scoring for film.. this is probably pretty important to you.  The only trouble is that some of the really good libraries are in the thousands of dollars which roughly translates to “Matt is not likely to invest in those unless Matt is making money via scoring for film.”  However there’s some good stuff out there that falls into the $250 range.  Not bad at all…
5. Mix Engineering Tools (Effects):  Tools of the trade for creating a great Mix.  There’s a certain amount of free stuff out there, and there’s a lot of pricey stuff out there, and there’s perhaps a lot of in between out there.  Right now I’m looking at Liquid Mix which, at the time of this writing, seems to runs at $800.  Liquid Mix isn’t all you need to get going, but it does seem to do a pretty good job of covering some important bases.
6. Other Effects:  I have most of my effects bases pretty well covered, but as it stands I would like to invest in effects for working in 5.1, I’d like to invest in reverb effects, delay effects, and perhaps just whatever might add a little spice / FUBAR to my work.
7. Digital Instruments (synths and samplers):  I’m a Komplete user, and my upgrade for that will run me around $450..  I just upgraded to Kore as a part of that.  For the most part I’m happy sticking to Native Instruments stuff.. I think they have some of the best instruments in the world, but there is other stuff out there worth looking at:  Vintage synth emulations, orchestral emulation type stuff, and other odds and ends. 
8. Voice Instruments:  I can’t really sing, and there are a number of voice synthesizer type instruments that can help you create vocal tracks in your production.  I don’t remember the exact cost of these, but lets say we are talking about around $300 or so.
9. Microphones: When I work with microphones I feel a little like I’m painting with sound in a certain kind of way.  Different microphones color sound in different ways, and different microphones have different studio applications.  The question is what are the right microphones for what you’re interested in doing.  I’m interested in microphones for field recording, voice / dialog recording, and perhaps recording of other things.  Good microphones can run you upwards of $1000..  As a result I tend to go with cheap microphones.
10. Instruments for the studio:  I have a goal of being able to have a group of musicians come to the studio where we can work on projects without them  necessarily having to lug gear over.  My idea is that all the instruments would go direct line in, which is to say they wouldn’t actually be amplified in the studio, thus I could have a studio in a place where making loud noise, say like in an apartment somewhere, would be an issue.  For this I plan on spending around $500 or so on an electronic drum set, $200 on a cheap o Bass, and I think about investing around $1000 or so on a good guitar.  I might also like to spend something on an additional keyboard.
11. Audio Interface: The interface is how you get audio into your computer.  I currently own an old MOTU 828 which, in conjunction with a 16 channel digital mixer gives me 18 channels in and out with about 6 XLRs with phantom power running at up to 24-bit at 48 KHz.  I also have a Zoom H4 that will work as a 2 channel interface, with 2 XLRs with phantom power that will run at 24-bit 96KHz, and a Kore Interface with 2 channels with 1/4″  I/O at 24-bit 96KHz.  For modern music production you really want at least about 24-bit 96KHz which makes my MOTU 828 and the 16 Channel mixer a little on the obsolete side.  If I want an interface that will allow me to record lots of stuff at once I need to think about upgrading that interface which will probably cost me at least $500 or so.
12. DAWs (Digital Audio Work Stations):  I already own a number of DAWs: Digital Performer, Cubase, and Ableton Live.  The only trouble is that to use these on the new computer I’ll probably need to upgrade them and the upgrade cost is probably around $200 a pop.  My general feeling is that I could upgrade about one a year, depending on which upgrade looks best to me..  I should add to this that I’m planning on upgrading Digital Performer for the new computer, I’m annoyed at the Cubase Dongle thing, I’m having trouble with the registration of Digital Performer for that upgrade, so it may be that I’ll end up having to invest in Logic Studio, which will run around $500.  It’s also worth mentioning that DAWs usually come with audio effects and instruments..  So buying into a DAW can be worth it just in terms of the effects and instruments, let alone the DAW its self!
13. Field Recorder:  I’m thinking cheap here.  I own a Zoom H4, which is pretty groovy, but I’m also thinking of the Zoom H2, mainly because it kinda sorta allows one to record in surround sound.

So that’s an overview of the sound part of my studio Map..  Lets quickly move through some of the other areas. 

3D Graphics and Animation: I’m looking at a program known as Modo, which is apparently all the rage, and runs at close to $900.  Modo is really more about modeling then it is about animation, but its animation tools have come along ways in a short space of time.    

After Effects could come under 3D graphics and animation, and probably should.  My cost of upgrading is $300.  I’m thinking about doing so for Animation and Video. 

Graphics, Design, Interactive:  I’m currently in a pretty good place when it comes to graphics, design, and interactive.  The main tools I’m now looking at adding to my tool set include Adobe Flex, and Painter.

Video Cameras: I haven’t looked too deeply into this subject, but generally I’d put video cameras into two categories “for social media” and “for professional production.”  On the professional production side I suppose I’m looking at the Cannon XL H1.. In part because I don’t know any better, which I’ve found as “cheap” as $2600.  This price actually seems really good to me.  It’s also worth mentioning that one can rent gear, which would probably be more cost effective then running out and buying expensive gear.

On the social media side you’re really looking for something that’s convenient for carrying around with you, at the expense of quality, and for this we are really only talking a couple hundred dollars or so.  

 Lights:  A big part of getting good results in video production is your ability to paint with light.  One can probably get a decent lighting Kit for around $1000.. and can probably make do for a bit less.

Chroma Keying: Without doing my homework on this, we are probably talking around $200 for a fairly inexpensive green screen.  In addition it probably makes sense to buy “scopes” which is to say software that tells you what’s going on in the colors you’re shooting, so that you can get the light optimal for the chroma keying.

For those not in the know, chroma keying is used so that you can shoot in front of your green screen and composite that video with other elements..  This would be one of the main techniques used in making a film like Star Wars.. and its a fairly basic special effects sorta thing..  But one that’s not terrible easy to do really well.  That said, its fairly central to what I want to be doing. 

Photography Camera:  Again we have pro and social media.  On the Pro side we are looking at DSLRs, which have a pretty good range of price.  DSLR stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex.  With a DSLR you want both the camera and lenses, and lenses can get pricey fast.  I’ve been doing a little research into the topic, but not enough to really have a sense of what I actually need.  My guess is we are talking around $1000 for the camera, and a few hundred dollars for lenses, basically.

What I need the DSLR for is documenting my paintings, general art photography,  macro shooting, social media type stuff, and to sorta document the creative process of the various projects I’m working on.  Another words to bring you into my world.  There’s probably also a roll for the DSLR for elements to be used in my video production projects.

On the social media side we can get a camera for a few hundred bucks.. just your basic point and shoot..  or hell, even use a cell phone camera.  Wouldn’t it be nice if this blog entry had some pictures associated with it?  The notion of the social media side as different from the DSLR / Pro side is that you really want something that you don’t have to lug around with you everywhere.

Ok, lets wind things up with a quick look at computers:

 As of my writing we are a week or so away from Mac World where new computers will more then likely be announced, thus I’m waiting for Mac World to actually upgrade my computers.  In the mean time I’m looking at different Mac options, just to get a sense of the land scape.

 What I’ll probably do is as follows, or what I would do if I wasn’t waiting for Mac World:  Mac Book Pro 17″ upgraded to a high res screen and a 250 GB drive.  We are talking about $3050 here, which is a lot of money.  Add to this the price of a printer which comes to close to free with rebates, an Air Port Base Station for WiFi, Windows XP, VMWear, and some sort of software for home financing…. Oh yeah, and Apple Care.. which is your basic extended service agreement.  In addition to this I’ll want another monitor for the lap top at some point in the future.

Ok.. So that’s a Map of where I want to go long term, but I sure as hell ain’t going to be investing all of that money anytime soon!  (But oh boy would I like to.)  Besides just not having the money, there are a couple reasons why you probably wouldn’t want to invest all that at once:

You can really only learn so much so fast, and the amount of gear we are talking about, to fully get the most out of, would probably take more then a year to fully master. Indeed, certain small parts of the total could take over a year to fully master!  In that time, with technology rolling forward, the parts of the studio that you weren’t using, if you didn’t spend the money.. would become cheaper or do more for the same amount of money.  

So what I’m looking to invest in right now is as follows:  Mac Book Pro with its stuff, Digital Performer, and maybe After Effects.  That’s it.  So we are probably talking under $5,000.  That said, I am thinking that inside of 2008 I’d like to update Kore (around $450?) think about a DSLR (more then a grand probably) and I’m debating investing in a little over $100 worth of microphones.

If this is the year, as I hope it is, where gainful employment really becomes more then just a hope, then there’s a very good chance, depending on how gainful the employment is that we are talking about, that more of this studio could be invested in.

As a final note, this list is one that really glosses over details, is but but a rough overview.  In the future I plan to talk more about the tools in question, and various other details.. so do stay tuned. 

This is nothing on nothing, so don’t bother reading it…  I just figure I need to get in the habit of posting stuff..  so here’s stuff.  Here’s something. 

I’m frustrated that my writing seems like shit at the moment.. or my blogging.  My words are painful to try and read..  I’m sure I have stuff worth saying.. and when I really get into it..  seems like it might even be worth reading, but how to get from here to there is a giant question mark.. if for no other reason then for fear that someone might actually read these words.

At Podcamp Boston 2 I had this kind of paranoia.. this feeling that some of the people you are bumping into are reading what you have to say.. or worse still, listening to what you have to say via the podcast..  Some of these bastards even have the audacity to tell you to your face “yeah, I checked out your podcast.”  

My reply is usually one of sympathy.. that they had to suffer through such a thing..  and those bastards have no problem lying to your face.. they tell you things like “no, I thought it was kind of interesting,” or “very unique” (now there’s a passive aggressive comment if I ever heard one!), or um..  I don’t know, they say different things..

 Yeah, ok.. some of these social media folks are just nice folks.. gotta lot of humanity and all that.. but um.. yeah…  I don’t know..  you could say I have a few anxieties about putting myself out there like this.  You could say..  

Well anyway..  So I’m going to try and keep posting..  I haven’t since my mom passed away..  And I think its time to step up to the plate again and start swinging..  now being the end of 2007…  the last few hours there of.. might as well post something..