Flow with motivation

I believe that there is only a certain amount of tasks that humans can do where the prime motivator is that we have been asked or told to. I think these tasks use a very specific type of energy in the body and brain that needs to be replenished before it can be used again, and that this energy is different from the kind that is used when we are in a flow state where we want to do things. The motivation for these type of forced tasks is often money but it can also be things like household tasks or other obligations.

The interesting point for me is that how our mind interprets these things that we have to do can be informed, heavily, by how we frame them. A diary filled with tasks that NEED performed can easily begin to feel like work and tire us out, using up this precious slow renewing energy. The problem is that we chose to fill our diary with them so it feels like they shouldn't tire us out because we picked them, but they are still things we now feel obligated to do. If they don't get done, we will feel a similar guilt to missing a deadline or failing to deliver on a promise.

So how do we deal with this? The answer, in my mind anyway, has to do with motivation and minimalism. There are obviously some tasks that we will actually need to perform, but we can minimise the number of tasks that we perform in this way and try to ask the question "Do I really need to do this right now?". In this way we can simplify our lives and focus on the things that really matter and that we wish to do. Spending more of our time on things that we feel motivated to do allows us to tap into the state of flow that affords frictionless performance, fueled by our desire to work in the task space while in our current state of mind. Asking this question also allows us to weed out tasks that actually offer no value to our lives but we've been performing basically because we always have, or feel that we should. 

The hardest part of creativity

I think the hardest part about creating anything is not trusting yourself to come up with something good. It doesn't seem to matter how many things you put out, and how much you improve, you always have this nagging doubt that the thing you are currently working on will turn out trash and you have no idea what you are doing. Having the best ideas often seems to be a magical occurrence, largely outwith your control, and that is extremely frustrating.

The natural reaction to this, for most people, is to try to nail down what makes you most creative and then try to re-create that situation or circumstances. The problem with this is that we forget that our mind is working in the background, churning away on ideas. It's doing its best work when we aren't having anything to do with it. In some sense that is the true genius, the real artist in all our creative work. It's also the part of the equation that doesn't sit well with creative people because they like to see themselves as the artist, they are the creator, not some part of their brain buried deep in the background. Why do we think of our 'self' as only our conscious brain? Why do we disassociate that ancient part of our brain from our sense of self when it is clearly so important in how we view the world and what we put out into the world as our creative message?

Should I use a vocal monitoring mix when recording?

On the human experience

So I've been thinking lately about being a human and how we experience things. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the problems people have in life come down to viewing life as something we have, rather than something we experience. Each of us feels like the life we have is our possession or right and that we actually own it and control it. When things go wrong we find the situation really difficult to marry up with that feeling of ownership because we are coming from the perspective that we possess our life and control it. Maybe a better way to deal with life is to think about the idea that we are actually experiencing it, almost as an observer. Life is happening and we are taking part in it but it's not so much that we own our lives. This lets us have less expectations on life and consequently get less bent out of shape about small things that come up or even big things that would normally take up all of our thinking. The situation may be bad, but maybe we should just think about what we can do to enjoy our current experience, rather than stressing out about the fact that life is, mainly, just not in line with what we expected.

I've personally been finding this quite useful in dealing with some medical issues I've been having recently. I'm still nervous about things and I still worry to an extent but I'm worrying less because I've tried to remember the perspective that my body is not something I have complete control over. Sure I can change some things about it through exercise and diet etc but It's not really 'my' body so to speak but the body that i'm experiencing life through. Things about it will fail over time and I have to accept that fact. This helps me to stop worrying about every little ache or problem and wondering whether they could be part of the medical issues i'm going through. They are just part of having a body. I know it sounds completely crazy but nothing takes pain away like understanding that it's not a problem or that it's under control.

It's quite a subtle shift in thinking but i'm finding it quite powerful. 

A bad situation

So i'm currently in a situation i'm finding very difficult. There are lots of details that I won't go into but the long and short of it is i'm having to sell my home and move in with my mum for a while. Now don't get me wrong, my mum's place is nice and we get on well, so that in that sense it really isn't a problem. The problem for me is that while my house is being sold i'm finding it extremely difficult to be creative as everything is up in the air. I don't know how and when I will be able to create and that is not a particularly nice feeling for me. I'm a man of routine and I find major disturbance to that routine very difficult to deal with.

What i'm finding hardest to deal with currently is the consequences of this to my thinking. Normally, as anyone who reads my thoughts on here would know, I don't put much stock in career or the traditional measures of success such as titles and salary. With everything that's going on however, i'm finding it hard not to view myself as a failure by other people's career driven standards. I'm craving the satisfaction of having career reward and all the bells and whistles that go with it with being able to remember that I took a different path - DELIBERATELY. For quite a few days I was really struggling with these feelings but I think I've managed to put them into some context. In short I think I've been paradoxically craving the stability that a traditionally successful life would afford. The nice house and not having to worry about how it would all be taken away. The thing is, I crave that because of how it would allow me to be creative, without paying attention to the fact that chasing that career would eat up so much of my time that I would never be able to actually do those things properly. I've been in that situation before and it didn't work well for me at all.

In short not being able to be creative currently, with any regularity, is causing me to feel like I need to take the easiest path back to my routine. The easiest path currently feels like it would be to take on more career chasing, get more reward and stabilize the spinning chaos. In truth this would lead to discontent in the long term because my heart isn't in that life-style. It would also take longer than I think as I've not been chasing that type of success, with good reason. A better solution, I think, is to try to ignore all the spinning chaos, ignore the career and just get back to doing things that inspire me and build up my mental energy. Maybe I can't create right now, but I can fill my head with ideas for later. That song I can't record, at least write down the idea. That nice lyrical note, note it down. Hopefully this will mean that when I do sort out my situation and get a routine going, I can actually really get my money's worth out of it. I think there are also some other forms of creative activity that I can do in the meantime, such as working on books and other activities that don't require me to have a set of tools such as instruments and microphones.

Words have power because you can't ignore them

One of the most difficult things in life can be learning when/how to ignore other people and blocking out things they say or the effect they have on you. It is a sad fact that in most conversations you have with people, that go beyond the very basic or mundane, the person you are conversing with will have some form of agenda that is not necessarily aligned with your own. These thoughts can, over time, get embedded under your brain and become difficult to shift. Like some clawing little beast inside your mind, you can't even remember why it is you suddenly feel the need to do something. It feels like a compulsion that you can't tie down until suddenly it hits you, this is because of that conversation you had with that weird guy in the uni lab isn't it. You remember, that one where he told you about his theory on life and how it's very fabric is affected by demon carrots and our zombie rabbit masters.

You see this is the danger of cognition and language. We hear, parse and understand language but we don't have some underlying system for processing it without it entering our brain first. It's not like the autonomous parts of the central nervous system, it has to actually fire neurons in our grey matter and get swirled around and reinforce the pathways that the thought takes. This means that simply by listening to an idea, even if it's complete garbage, we still run the risk of internalising it. This is the principle behind a lawyer blurting out something in a courtroom that is then stricken from the record. It was still heard and it will still influence the jury, whether they want it to or not.

This concept grows arms and legs when you consider that some people have things they want you to hear, even if they have no idea whether it's the best thing for you or whether the concept could cause you damage or get you in trouble. Words are a powerful thing and we would do well to not use them with complete abandon, as we most often do.

Happiness versus contentedness

Today I want to talk about the concept of happiness versus contentedness. I think most people would know what you meant if you discussed being happy but I feel that often we confuse happiness with contentedness. For me happiness is a much more fleeting emotion, centred around our current situation. If we eat a piece of chocolate we often feel a high, an upwards lift, but it is often tempered with a negate longer term effect. Contentedness, on the other hand, is a much more steadied emotion, calm and neither up nor down. It is also much less direct and it's cause can often be more difficult to tie down.

So how does happiness come about? Well, its roots seem to be in the pre-frontal cortex, the youngest part of the human brain. There is where a lot of rational thought occurs and is the area in which we spend most of consciousness. It is also the area of our brain over which we can exert the most control. We can easily change what we are immediately thinking about or doing, so we can make ourselves immediately happy. One of the best example of this can be seen with substances such as drugs and alcohol. Both have been known to numb negative emotions and create a positive sense of happiness. The same can be said of sexual promiscuity with a newly aquainted stranger. Again it may cause an immediate sense of happiness but the effects of such can be quite negative to our longer term goals.

In contrast to this contentedness is formed, in my opinion, in the older parts of the brain that deal with longer term emotions and what we would call the sub-conscious. Here is where a lot of our anxieties, troubles and any underlying issues tend to reside. These bubble up at random times in response to things that don't often seem to make much sense. This is also why we refer to not dealing with negative emotions as "burying" them. We don't deal with them immediately, to avoid our un-happiness, and instead allow them to enter our deeper sub-conscious brain. Because contentedness comes from a much deeper part of our brain, it can feel much more difficult to get a handle on. Cause and effect seems much less entwined and the emotions arising from this part of our brain can often seem quite chaotic. What created them is often so removed from their eventual symptom that we feel like the brain is acting in a random way.

In short I believe that we can have a happy young brain and a happy old brain (A painful neurological simplification, but a useful one none the less). If we feed our young brain mental chocolate it will be happy but paradoxically this could be creating a situation in which our old brain is becoming increasingly worried, upset and anxious. The opposite is also often true in that to make our old brain happy we have to focus on longer term contentedness, often to the detriment of our immediate happiness. A good example of this is a task such as garden-work. We cut the grass and pull up weeds because the garden has gotten to the point where it needs done. It's not a task we particularly enjoy (Although, admittedly, I do now) but we do it because we know that if we leave it, we will end up in a worse situation and the stress will cause us to be in a state that is not content. The immediate happiness of watching our favourite TV show or doing something else enjoyable is tempered with the longer term discontent. To quote the bible, "When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things." Children, almost pathologically, seek out happiness with little thought towards contentedness. As adults we try to explain to them why it's important to not just eat ice cream all the time or watch TV until their eyes glaze over. The truth is that we are often so ill informed of our own discontent that we are not best placed to actually explain to them why this is important. With a little work to understand though, we can be.

Name change!

So recently I decided to start using DistroKid to get my music out there into the bigger, wider world. It's a great service that will let you upload as many releases as you do in a year for a flat rate fee per year. It uploades to all the usual suspects, iTunes, Spotify etc. Seems great right? Well it is until you discover that your stage name "Pipo" is shared with a French Salsa musician who has a larger fanbase than you and thus dwarfs all your releases. Not so good! With that in mind, and to avoid any potential legal matters, I have decided to re-brand. My new name will be "Pipo Animatronic". This should be easy for people to find, has a nice ring to it and fits well how I feel about myself a lot of the time. I often feel like i'm more of an imitation human, trying to understand the world around me, while getting it wrong a lot of that time, and that fits well the image of an animatronic puppet.

Envy

Sometimes in life it's difficult not to get carried away by wanting things and not really understanding why. What you want could be something material like a new car or even something situational like wanting to be able to do what someone else is doing at a given time. We desire what we don't currently have but often this is actually just the product of unchecked envy. A little envy can be useful if it drives us to better our situation but often it can be problematic and lead to greed and also to following paths that aren't good for us. That's the key factor that most people ignore when dealing with this, the other variable in the situation - other people.

Let's say that you go into work and someone in your team has a beautiful shiny new ferrari. They have been saving for months and months and they just want to tell you all about and how great it is. You listen intently but start to get annoyed, you wish it was you with the new car. You wish it was you with that proud smile. This is because you are only seeing the present, the other person's happiness, the fact they get to drive home in it tonight. What you don't see is how long they probably had to save, what they had to go without, what they will have to do to keep it running and well maintained. It also might not bring you the same happiness it is bringing them. Your situation is different after all. Ironically it's a danger of only living in the present and not thinking about the future or the past.

Another key place that I see this type of thinking (and I suffer from this sometimes as well, much to my frustration) is when people are dealing with their careers and creative pursuits. They want that promotion, that bigger fanbase, that perfect sound. They see an artist playing a style of music and want to go home and start doing that as well as their own stuff. The problem is that this can lead to following hundreds of different paths when a lot of them aren't necessarily even correct or compatible with the life the person has chosen for themselves. None of the paths are bad, but they doesn't make them right either. What if that artists dedicates 8 hours a day to doing just that style? What if the person getting promoted is working 3 hours every night after work because they really love the job? What if you aren't prepared to do that or would even be capable of it? Well maybe then it's worth considering what path is your correct path, rather than what path you would like to have right now. The question isn't "Would I like to have that?", it's "How much work would I prepared to put in to get to that point and keep going?" and also "What would I have to give up to get that?".

I'm not Steve Jobs biggest fan, that's for sure, but there is an old interview where he talks about Apple's strengths and brings up one point about this area. I'm not saying he's some guru or source of wisdom but there is always a danger in ignoring everything someone says just because you don't agree with the vast majority of their outlooks, so i'm including it here. He states that Apple's biggest strength was their ability to decide which things to pursue and which things to ignore, even if they were good opportunities. I think that's key, it's not about the easy things to say no to, everyone can do those. It's about having the discipline to say that some things aren't for you, so you can work on the things you really want, which are right for you and knowing how to recognise those things.

Giving up on apple

That's it, a step too far, i've had enough! I am going back to Windows and Linux.

Okay, click-bait aside, let's talk about this rationally. Basically i've been getting progressively more annoyed with apple's direction for a while now and here's why.

1. Lack of investment in pro/creative products and software

The mac pro and to a similar extent the Macbook pro have seen very little in the way of genuine upgrades recently. The Macbook Pro, following it's most recent upgrade, is now an under-powered, over-priced faux-luxury machine and simply doesn't compete with the PC options on any front. The laptop options in it's price range are both numerous, and, generally speaking, better value. The Mac Pro is basically a product no-one doing anything professionally actually wants now. It hasn't been upgraded in any meaningful way since for years. It's essentially just a halo product but it's not aspirational for anyone other than people who are strongly tied into the i-world. Apple's products used to be the best built, the best running etc and they simply aren't keeping up anymore with the other options out there. I understand that Apple has optimised the OS to work well on the hardware but there is only so far you can push it before it's simply a smokescreen. Does Final Cut render faster than Adobe Premier Pro for a lesser spec'd Mac to PC? Sure. Does it offer the same feature set and usability of Premier Pro? No, not even close and that's the key point here. If you want to use Apple products you have to think their way and utilise the system in exactly the method they intended. They may think differently but often they think too simply to be any use beyond the trivial.

Back in the day Steve Jobs used to tell everyone that Apple was the company that cared about what they made, that took pride in the small details and doing a good job, a better job than it's competitors. If that's still the case, why are they encouraging a sort of dumb, blank mind, stupidity amongst their customers? One click functionality is great if you nail what the customer actually wants to happen with that click. If, however, you simply take away all the options and leave the one-click functionality as the only option you create a system that is so inflexible that it really is just a toy. Yes if you want to invest a lot of money into the various parts of the ecosystem, on a regular basis, then you can have a very nice toy but nothing more. In short, Apple now concerns itself with the trivial, not the pro or the creative user.

2. The price

What the hell are Apple on thinking they can get away with the current pricing. For years and years Apple were the hyper expensive alternative to traditional PCs. They had barely any market share until they started pricing themselves competitively. This happened around the time they switched to intel based processors and anyone that was around at that time will recall their carefully detailed argument about the fact that being on Intel would allow them to LOWER prices due to the standardised architecture and lower production costs than IBM equivalents. Now it seems they want to go back to the old world, charging extortionate amounts for machines that don't really offer any advantage. There is no doubt that in my mind that almost every product Apple now sells is overpriced. Apart from the $300 picture book of course, which represents brilliant value for money................

3. The focus on the mobile world

For years now Apple seem to have had their entire focus on the mobile market. iPhones and iPads are fine as a business proposition but not if you do it at the expense of your entire pro market. I already mentioned that Apple's focus has been on the trivial use case and this represents exactly that movement. Can you make a nice picture book on your iPad? sure. Whip out that same iPad in a studio recording situation as your main mixing platform and chances are you are not going to get paid for that session.

4. Stability

I used to use Mac OSX because it was the nicest, most stable OS around. Having moved back to Windows I can honestly say that's not the case anymore. Windows is behaving itself really pretty well and on those few occasions that it crashes I can usually figure out what went wrong and actually apply some logic to fix the problem. I grew up using windows machines and it's nice to go back to a world that seems both familiar and to be applying some more rationality to it's problem solving.

5. Bizarre software design

It's only going back to PC that i'm starting to get a sense of just how warped my perception of the whole computing world had become by using OSX and Apple products. Everything on a Mac is something other than what you are used to and i'd just gotten familiar with this weird way of working. It's nice not having to "quit" my application after i've closed it. It's nice having a menu with all my apps available if I forget to put something into the dock or quick launch area. I appreciate the familiarity of "Save as copy" over "Duplicate". Everything just feels like it makes sense again. I have to put more work into some things sure, but that work is rewarded by knowing the system i've put in place and understanding why it is the way it is. On Mac you think you understand what's going on and then suddenly you find that you've once again stumbled into some 7th circle of Hell reserved only for those who like they're entire project structures buried inside unreadable file/bundle/other random container that changes with each release. Everything about the way Mac works with applications is crow-barred into this strange way of thinking that OSX has and it's not until you step back from the edge of the cliff that you see just how messed up it actually is.

On being mid-project and the fascination of stepping stones

One of the most difficult times for me, personally, on any project is the middle section. You have some stuff done and it all seems like it's fitting into place but you know there is still a long road ahead until it's finished and often you don't see how to get there clearly. I find this time really difficult and I have a habit of comparing the current state of a project to finished examples. Most of the time this comparison is not exactly favourable on the unfinished work.

For me this whole stage of the project process is a little bit like the infamous scientific proof where one section simply reads "magic happens here". That "magic" is this middle part of the project or more specifically it's the transition between the middle section and some beautiful end state. At some point it stops being a middle of a project and becomes the beginning of the end. The home stretch, the last lap.

My main issue with this process is mental, it's the mental malaise that comes with comparing to finished work and not knowing how to get the current project to that state. Even if I do know how to get there, that can still be difficult because it doesn't feel like it's possible to get to that end state. I can genuinely start to feel depressed about the fact that I don't seem to be any closer and can't get past that middle ground and over the "magic" bridge into a clear path to the goal. Recently though there are two techniques that I've been using to combat this.

The first technique is something that I call current-state-mindfulness. This is the mental act of trying to take delight in the current stage of the process. If I am recording guitars then I am trying to really enjoy recording them, geek out and get really into it. Find the joy in mic placement, amp selection and all the other stuff that goes along with it. To quote Ze Frank "Try not to view the current state as just a stepping stone to something else, and if it is then try to become fascinated by the shape of the stone".

My second technique is cathartic side projects. These are basically projects that aren't what I would consider core to my main goal or are styles that I don't really particularly have anything to add to but they make me happy to create. Recently i've been working on a serious of metal tracks under an EP called Adrenaline Fuel. These have no vocals and I set up the basic mix of these in a pre-production stage before I started. The goal of them is to enjoy making them but also to allow me to have something musical that has a quick turnaround. I don't spend days agonising over the mix or this sound or that, I just make them some good-ish and then release them. The point is that finishing them gets me through that mid-track malaise. I often use them as a method of getting a break from something that is much more involved or mentally taxing. They also don't sound bad at all which is a nice aside. I often listen back to them just for the fun of it. It's almost free-ing to listen to something i've made and not criticise it.

Scratch tracks and recording with a different sound

So recently I have been experimenting with recording tracks with a different sound to that which I intend to have in the final mix. The reason for this is that I'm trying to separate my concerns when it comes to the sound versus the performance. When I record guitar I like to record with a very bass heavy, muddy, oversaturated tone. Why? Well quite frankly because I play better with that sound. I grew up playing guitars in my bedroom with no other instruments and I got used to the sound of the guitar taking up all the frequency spectrum because I had no other instruments to play with it. When I play with that type of sound I get a really good performance because it feels natural to me. The problem I have been finding though is that this isn't always the best sound when it comes to mix time. In particular I struggle to get the drums and guitars to gel without muddying up the entire mix. It occurred to me that what I really want to do is record with the tone I like but have the actual tone be something more fitted to the track. The way I handle this is to record a dry version of the guitar input to the daw and then re-record the amp tracks, from this dry tone, later. I monitor through my usual guitar setup so what I hear while i'm recording is my familiar tone. This is re-amping as we all know and love and nothing spectacular. What to me was the revelation was the idea that I didn't have to actually record in anything like the tone I planned on having in the end mix. For a start the tone I like to record with is a Marshall and the track I was working on ended up using a Mesa Boogie. This got me wondering if other guitarists have this same problem of hearing a good tone as something that is virtually unusable when it comes to mix time, or whether this is just a very peculiar affliction on my part?

I remember listening to an interview with Celldweller and Blue Stahli where they both talked about making demo versions of tracks, and then changing them later. They use crappy sounds to begin with to get the idea down and then work on the better version later. I find this really interesting because it is exactly what i'm discovering as a way to work, you are treating the different stages of the process as separate. Writing is writing and producing is producing.

Working to a timed plan

One of the time management techniques that I have been fond of for quite a while now is setting out what I intend to do in each day in a mind-map. It's sort of a chore list, I guess, but has things on it like "work on music track" or "do exercise". The main idea was that I would check off the items on it when I finished them each day. This went through several iterations along with various tweaks but I just couldn't find a method of working or set of tasks that I could get done consistently. There was always something that got left off the list or just didn't get completed. This was both disconcerting and quite frustrating. I felt that the list of items was achievable, but no matter how much I paired it down I just couldn't finish it on any given day. How could this be so difficult?

Some time passed, struggling with this method of working, and I read a book called "The way we're working isn't working" by Tony Schwartz which laid out a lot of things about work and productivity. I don't agree with every point the book makes but a lot of them do seem very sensible. One of its main points was the idea that human beings have a well of will power each day that can be both replenished and withdrawn from when required. Every decision we make in a day takes some energy out of this well but decisions that require a lot of work on our part, against some resistance, are particularly draining. As such this brought me to realise that even though I had a plan for what I wanted to do with a day, the act of having to decide to begin doing an activity at any given time was actually draining a lot of my will-power. In short it was actually making the tasks more difficult as I was already depleted when starting them. The problem was that even though I had a set list of what I want to do on a day, I hadn't defined WHEN I wanted to do these things, other than on that day. It's the old problem of starting, but I had made it so I had to "decide" to start tasks lots of times throughout the day and often this meant stopping something else, making the decision twice as hard.

As such I decided that instead I would look at what I had planned each day and actually make a time plan. I set out what each block of time was going to be for and had it planned out for all the hours I intended to be productive during the day and for each day of the week. The difference? Well pretty astounding so far. Before doing this my productivity was sparse and fairly spasmodic. Sometimes I would gets lots done but often I would just not start or only do 10 minutes here or there, usually with not the greatest results. The first week of trying this new method, I did 8 hours over the course of two days and was really happy with the results. The week after, the same again and this week so far has been the same yet again. That's a whole lot of productivity for me! Probably more than i've ever managed consistently in my entire life (without making myself sick). I'm hoping this will help to keep things moving forward. Sometimes when I have these nice ideas I find it hard to stick with them, so it should be interesting to see if this time is different. The signs so far though are very good.

Dave from Boyinaband's "I'm not dead"

To anybody that hasn't already seen this, it's a quite fantastic summary of the difficulties of creating and a comment on the subject of defining your self-worth by what you create. It's something that is very close to my heart and it's both troubling but selfishly comforting to see someone I look up to suffering from the same issues.

How the world stops us appreciating the little things

One of the things I appreciate most in the entire world is walking along a city street in the rain, when everyone else is trying to get out of it. I imagine myself in some film noir film or painting, my long coat keeping me covered and secure, while the rain pounds off the street surface around me. People sprint left and right to try to get into shelter, their worried faces flashing my quiet contented smiling face a dagger'd scowl. It's a small fascination I have and one that most people don't share but it helps me get through my day. You see most mornings where I experience this feeling are those in which I'm on my way to the office to do a day's hard work. These types of little things get me through and in that sense are quite important to me.

This brings me to my main point, the modern world around us discourages this kind of quiet appreciation of little things that cost nothing. We are almost perpetually driven to want bigger, better, faster and crucially more expensive things, possessions and experiences. We are also told that if something is bad then it is bad, if it's good for most then it should be good and enjoyable for all. Everything is portrayed as black and white, and all the details are lost. We are somewhat discouraged from finding joy in small things that everyone else finds a nuisance or a hassle or even just unenjoyable. I think it's important to be able to do just that because it keeps us anchored both to ourselves and to the world around us, the real world. It helps us not get caught up in a world that is more and more appealing to our base selves and is largely controlled by people who don't have our best interests at heart. Advertising is almost always cynical, crude and designed to make people unhappy. If it makes us contented then it's not really doing it's job.

So how do you combat this? How do you deal with it? The trick, in my mind, is to recognise when something small is making you feel happy or content and make sure to actually experience it. Focus your time around these things instead of just taking them for granted. The next time i'm walking through the rain i'm going to try to not think about the day ahead or the day's past. I won't be walking along paying no attention but instead will enjoy the moment and try to live within it.

Excellent performance of doom on Vulkan !

So this morning I got the updated version of Doom (2016) on pc that lets me use the new Vulkan API. All I can say is WOW. I am running a fairly low-end pc, an AMD FX-6300 with 8 gig of Corsair Vengeance ram clocked at 2133Mhz. In terms of graphics card i'm running a 2013 Saffire R9 270X with 4 gig of VRam. I'm overclocking this card as in the following image from MSI afterburner.

I have most of the settings in Doom turned up to high and the anti-aliasing set to the highest level. With v-sync turned on i'm getting basically 60fps, pretty much locked at 1080p. The reason that this is surprising is that without Vulkan support I was experiencing drops to 30fps pretty regularly in this game. The V-Sync in doom is particularly aggressive and if you drop much below 60 it throttles everything back down to 30. Adaptive V-Sync isn't an option for AMD cards so I had actually just resorted to locking the game at 30 Using rivatuner. Long story short, if you are running Doom, get yourself onto VulkanRT, it's great.

On sickness, pressure and mental energy reserves.

Recently I was pretty unwell. I had a bad case of flu and because i'm asthmatic that means i'm usually out of it for at least a month while I recover. This is the same if I get a chest infection or really any kind of upper respiratory condition. I don't like feeling sick and unfit etc but the thing that gets to me most is the disruption to the things I enjoy doing like making music and playing sports. I'm usually bed-bound and it really gets to me being stuck there unable to do anything. It starts as frustration but usually ends with me punishing myself for not powering through and doing stuff. Quite simply this is a ridiculous thing to feel bad about, there is 100% nothing I can do and I just have to accept it. The moral of the story here is that feeling like that about yourself actually makes you worse, and less likely to get things done. When you are unable to do things, for whatever reason, rest and give yourself that time off to recover. It's not a bad thing, you aren't being a slacker, you are listening to your body. I'm over feeling sick now but I still honestly feel absolutely shattered and have some of the symptoms hanging around purely because i'm so tired. As such i've been easing myself back into my normal schedule of work and creativity and trying not to put too much pressure on. If I can't manage it on a given day, then I can't manage it on that day. I will go for a walk, spend time with a friend or just sit drinking a coffee quietly.

I think a nice way to frame this whole thing is to do with energy reserves. We all, as humans, have a well of energy from which we can draw. This can be in the form of mental energy or physical energy but the basis remains the same, it gives us the fuel to do something. The problem is that we have to replenish that well with things like those I mentioned before, things we enjoy that aren't too taxing and give us peace and/or a sense of ease. When we are sick, this well is pretty empty a lot of the time because our body is constantly fighting against the illness, draining us. Some days the well is dry even at the beginning of the day and that's okay, it's just something we have to accept. The key, for me, is understanding how much we have in the well that day, how much that will allow us to do and then work with that. Trying to fit in totally unrealistic amounts will just leave us physically and emotionally drained. Trying to sustain that state is virtually impossible and certainly runs counter to our body's natural state.

Some thoughts from working on old tracks

So recently I've been working on some material that I largely wrote in 2013, some metal tracks. I have two of the tracks out already and what i'm doing currently is recording the vocals and mixing the tracks together. What is interesting is that from the time they were written to the point when I recently started working on them, I had lost a large amount of the initial drive I had when I wrote them. Working on them again it has come back and i've been able to more easily write the lyrics and vocal lines than I would have if i'd just dove straight into them back then. The moral here is that sometimes music, even digital music, can be left to mature. This is because music is an expression of the self and the self matures over time. Obviously you can take this too far and end up constantly reworking things and never finishing them, i'm not proposing that. A close friend I knew had been working on the same album for close to a decade without ever finishing it or putting it out and the net effect was largely detrimental to his health. Doing and finishing certainly breed productivity and improvement but sometimes you do need to let things cool for a bit while you figure out what to do with them. I have been working on other tracks in the meantime and for the most part the tracks I did back then were in a good enough state that not too much work was required. I think that is possibly the key, its often that final finishing touch that can be difficult to see from the outset, even if the rest of the process went very smoothly.

As an aside the tracks can be found at https://soundcloud.com/pipoano/sets/scenes-of-violence

Getting geeky about speaker placement

Its a good thing !

So recently i'm sitting in front of my speakers, working away on a track and I notice that one seems slightly closer than the other. I'm hearing a tiny phase issue, just some washiness so I decide to get out the measuring tape and investigate. I'm not wrong. One is not only closer to the back wall but its also slightly pointing at an angle compared to the other. I can only assume that at some point I must have nudged it just a slight amount, caught it walking by. Why is this important? Well it's important because the distance your speakers are from each other, the wall and you can make a massive difference to what's known as the sweet spot. The sweet spot is where you can hear the mix translated most clearly, every frequency in it's place and nothing over-exaggerated or over-hyped. For most speakers this is a fairly small point (Think Sheldon from the big bang theory trying to locate the perfect spot in the cinema) and as such can be basically nuked out of existence by a few inches difference in speaker location.

It amazes me how much I still come across people who will agonise over speakers and which to buy etc only to get them home and proceed to best guess where to put them in the room and never measure them and adjust until they are at the right location. I spent a small fortune on my studio monitors but I also spent a long time assessing where to put them, how to angle them and measuring out distances on a plan and replicating these distances in the room. Quite simply, getting geeky about your speakers could mean the difference between great speakers sounding great and great speakers sounding like a bad hifi.

As an example, I didn't use to be so picky about speaker location. At one point I moved into a cottage in the countryside and proceeded to pick out the main living room area as my chosen studio location. I promptly set up my gear slap bang in the centre of the room and to my horror couldn't hear any bass whatsoever. I had epic speakers and bass heavy music, why couldn't I hear anything? In short, I was sitting right in the middle of the null point of the room. I experimented by moving my desk (Then on wheels) around and eventually decided on both a different room and an off centre position. The moral of the story, when it comes to speakers, is to read a little and think a lot. You'll thank yourself later.

For those not so keen on reading lots of articles I would say some quick tips are as follows:

1.) There should be a triangle formed between yourself and the speakers. The sides of the triangle should have the same length.

2.) Don't sit with your head in the centre of any dimension of the room. If you sit in the absolute centre of the room, expect to hear no bass, triangle or otherwise.

3.) Imagine a mirror on any surface you see. If you also see a speaker in the imaginary mirror, your speaker will reflect sound off that surface. Invest in acoustic treatment. I don't have thousands of pounds worth of the stuff, you don't need a lot either. Just be careful and plan where you are going to put it.

4.) What are the speakers sitting on? If it vibrates then you just created an issue that might distort the sound.

5.) Avoid putting speakers right next a wall. Especially in corners. Bass will build up and frustration with your weak sounding mixes will follow. As an aside I did get very good results, at one point, from putting a mattress directly behind my monitors. The room I was working in had a terrible shape and I had to make do. Sometimes thinking outside the box can help with less than optimal conditions.

Why I don't make fun of people praying

I shall start this post by putting forth that I don't subscribe to any organised religion. I consider myself an atheist but I enjoy reading into specific religions and taking from them what I consider useful or beneficial. That said, I do think they can do harm when people swallow wholesale the doctrine of one case or the other but i'm not here to argue the case for or against religion as a whole, not today anyway.

With regards to Christianity, I used to think that prayer was a totally futile endeavour. I didn't believe in god so I didn't see why people would get any benefit from conversing with him. Then I discovered meditation. I practice meditation pretty much daily and for me it has a hugely positive effect. I don't think this has anything to do with spirituality or mysticism, for me its purely scientific. Focusing your mind creates neural pathways for concentration. The more you meditate, the more you strengthen these pathways. For me its purely a chemical process. I also believe focusing on breathing helps regulate it and breathing through the nose instead of the mouth has proven medical advantages as the air is basically filtered through the nasal passageways. So anyway, how does this relate to prayer. Well consider what prayer is. The subject sits, tries to block out all other thoughts and repeats a saying or phrase. Whether they believe that anyone is listening is not the point. Many feel that their life improves afterwards and attribute this to god listening. I attribute it to the fact that they are implementing a daily, strictly adhered to, mindfulness practice in their life. They are, for all intents and purposes, meditating.

As a final note, I genuinely believe that most religion stems from a common point. As such the idea that meditation crops up in the Christian faith, albeit through a subtle means, is not surprising to me.