The Discontinuity of Life

So recently I've been thinking about the world and how most people seem to portion it out into little chunks and think of them as discrete units. This is in contrast to my understanding of the world as an interacting system. In my opinion this leads to issues which are largely systemic problems being treated as isolated incidents. Don't get me wrong I'm all for mental compartmentalisation but when it comes to external factors, understanding the system-wide implications of actions can go a long way to helping deal with life. For me one of the biggest examples of this is money.

Most people tend to view money as a thing, an object, something having intrinsic value in of itself. The truth, in my opinion, is that money is actually just a piece of a larger system. Money is a method of transferring goods and services, so in some sense it is actually more of a social contract than an object. It doesn't have an intrinsic value without the system that it operates within. By thinking of money as a discrete, we allow ourselves to become caught up in the pursuit of it. It becomes the end goal, rather than the facilitator. It leads to money becoming a status symbol, because of our possession of it. Me personally, I like to think of money as part of a system. If the money is flowing correctly through the system, I don't require to think about it or have it burden me. When I check my bank account to see if I have enough money to pay for something, I'm not thinking about how much money I have, I'm looking at the state of a system in flux. I understand that the aquiscion of money is only determined by my circumstances surrounding it. For instance, if I work so much that I cannot spend the money, then I have no real benefit from it. All the status or possessions in the world won't change the fact that I'm not better off for my inflated bank balance. What that bank balance actually represents in that state is a blockage in the system, a bottleneck. I think many things can be understood in this way.

So how do you deal with this mentally. How can you compartmentalise without trying to understood the world around you through a discrete lens. Well take for example the following:

I pick up a JIRA ticket at work and write some code. While I'm writing that code I'm focused and blocking some things out, I'm allowing myself to be in the pocket of the moment. When I'm finished I check that code in for code review. At this point I don't sit monitoring what has happened to that piece of code, I let it sit for a period while the reviewer goes over it. During this time I look into some other work, I research what I'm going to do next. My understanding is that my work isn't a discrete unit of work, its part of a larger system. That system is now handling the next step of the process. Most things we do have an effect, some influence on the system around them. Allowing the system to work and not focusing on the possession can go a long way to helping us act more effectively within the wider system.

Work passion balance : What does it mean?

People often talk about work life balance. I think this is a great thing and very important but I often also like to consider work passion balance. This is the balance between things that you do for employment and things that you are passionate about, but are not necessarily the same as your day job. I find that this balance is equally as important to keeping yourself comfortable as your creativity is often fed more strongly by passions. I believe there is also a valid balance to be sought between work, passion, family and recreation/relaxation. This gives a sort of 5 way balancing act that the original "work life balance" doesn't really adequately address. Its also the reason that I think so many people end up in a mess. They think that because they can get a basic 50/50 work to "everything else" ratio they will be okay. Personally this doesn't work for me. I have a lot more things going on that I need to address on a daily basis.

The difference between work and passion for me boils down to money, but in a subtly different way to what I guess most people see money as in relation themselves. I work hard in both pursuits and to the naked eye it would look like both are really just work. The difference is that work is something that someone pays me for but my passions are things i'd pay to do. This is significant because in this way money affects my motivations. If I wasn't being paid, I wouldn't go to work. The lack of any monetary incentive in my passion, however, is not discouraging. This isn't to say you can't have both but I don't think its as simple as monetising your passions and expecting it all to fall into place.

I think that people who manage to create a situation where their passion becomes their employment have to be very careful to keep the money side of things away from the general creative process. Its also one of the reasons that I don't believe you can buy truly creative people into an organisation and have it work. You have to provide people something else or it just won't work for them.

As an aside I also believe this is one of the reasons that having vastly different salaries between people who work in the same organisation, with relatively similar jobs, doesn't work. The minute you start defining success and progression as £ signs you remove focus from what's important. You also start artificially creating hierarchies and reinforcing rules that might not be appropriate. If you pay everyone roughly the same and find other, more effective, ways to incentivise your staff you stand a better chance of having a successful organisation.

Maintaining focus over the festive period

I love the festive period. Spending time with family, eating nice food and taking some time off from work can be great. Unfortunately though this usually means i'm less productive and that makes me, for want of a better way of putting it, twitchy. I have what most people who create have, a sort of voice inside you that won't let you rest. It constantly wants you to be creating and putting stuff out there. If you aren't it can get quite insistent and make you aggravated, disagreeable and just generally not a great person to be around. What that little voice doesn't understand is that you have to take down-time to be productive at other points, and the festive period is the perfect excuse. Its made even more so by the close proximity to new year's.

New year for me is a time to set objectives, think about the year ahead and try to decide on ways to tackle some of the year's problems. If i'm knee deep in actually doing project stuff, I can find it really difficult to do this kind of big picture thinking. I just want to work on what i'm working on. Taking a break from this project work lets my brain have that little bit o' space it needs to step back and think about what it wants to do. This year i've decided to try to tighten up my general daily routine. I had let my daily habits slip a bit over the last year and I wasn't happy with that. Its okay, i'm not going to beat myself up about it, because I was doing other things but now I want to work on them again. I also want to do some DIY stuff round the house, particularly in the summer,  and I want to try to spend a bit more time with my family. Obviously I want to keep making music and grow my youtube channel but these goals are not mutually exclusive to any others I might have. I just have to figure out how to spend less time in a mindless state and be aware of it. Mindless entertainment is like drugs. Your brain reacts in the same way it would to a hit, and it can be equally as difficult to break the habit. Purposeful planning and goals can help, alongside mindfulness training. Another trick i've found is to tell other people about what i'm doing. This works great with planning to spend time with family. If I tell me little girl that we will play a board game in half an hour, she will expect me to be ready to play in exactly half an hour (She's very precise with timekeeping). The thought of letting her down is enough to make me actually stick to the plan rather than if i'd simply thought to myself that I would play a board game with her at some point. Making the commitment, with a negative result if I don't follow through, forces me to do the right thing with regards to my plans and goals.

Joey Sturgis

So I've been reading a lot about the Joey Sturgis method lately and to me its very interesting. Particularly the idea that he does everything himself, including mastering. Conventional wisdom in the audio engineering field seems to be that you should always have someone else master your music if you want it to be of the absolute top quality. Sturgis' argument is that having control of the entire process, end to end, gives him more control over the sound of the production. He follows up by saying that often mastering issues are actually deferred mix decisions. This part of the argument i've heard from the same people who say its a terrible idea to master your own music but to me its much easier to fix the mix issues if you still have access to the mix. Sturgis also states that he works with his mastering chain largely in place and treats the entire process as moulding a piece of clay. The mix is less a series of process steps and more an unfinished production that works towards being complete. When its done, its done - mastered and all.

As with all things I feel there is a balance to be sought. There are different mindsets for different problems with audio production and the mental blurring can be a bit disruptive if you aren't careful with it. That being said, the idea of mixing and mastering at the same time is quite liberating as you avoid the jarring "My music doesn't sound loud enough" towards the end of the mix process. If you want to read more I recommend the sound on sound article below:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep14/articles/joey-sturgis.htm

Telecommunications

For some reason every interaction I have with telecommunications companies seems to leave me feeling that they are deliberately trying to make life difficult. They always seem to want to put up barriers against easy usage, charges for changing company, charges to fix their own errors etc. I can't help but feel that if they were regulated by similar rules as the financial services industry (Post RDR) they would find life a hell of a lot more difficult. There seems to be no equivalent of 'Treating customers fairly'. Its also my opinion that they were much more straight-forward to deal with when they did one thing each. It seems that managing my phone, mobile, tv and internet services is too daunting a prospect for a single company anymore.

Just this morning, for instance, BT charged me £30 to STOP providing me broadband. I wasn't in a minimum term contract and I wasn't asking for anything special. That's what they charge every customer who moves to cable. If you stick with ADSL, even with another company, you don't have to pay them the fee. That is actually providing a disincentive against customers moving to a better, easier managed, forward thinking technology. I would understand if they were a smaller company, with no vested interest in infrastructure, but BT actually stand to benefit from people moving to the newer system, so what on earth am I being charged for? To further add insult to injury, they completely lied about ever having being told to cancel the service (a month ago) and so I have to pay them another month's internet, that i'm not using, for their mistake.

Sadly the above episode is just one example from an entire novel's worth of misery from my interactions with almost all telecoms companies. Technology has moved forward so much in the last 15 years but in some ways we've paid the price for not holding the consumer level companies to their promise to correctly manage it and not shaft the customer.

Underdubbing

When we are mixing audio there is a temptation to always reach for EQ, Compression, or something even more fanciful. This is because we are in the mixing mindset, this is how you mix right. Its not that these tools don't have a place in the mix, they really do. Its just that sometimes we need to remember that taking things back to basics can be helpful, and so we instead reach for volume and panning controls. We try to balance what we have in front of us on the screen or coming through the console and apply the tools we are used to. The problem is that often, as with so much in audio, the cause of the issue is actually in the arrangement. There is simply too much going on. Trying to fit too many parts together at once can lead to a lack of focus and can render any attempt to massage the parts together as pointless.

Reasons

Accepting that the arrangement needs changing or altering in some way can prove one of the absolute hardest things to take on board for an artist. Their hand crafted, painstakingly sculpted work of art isn't perfect ? How dare you even suggest that ! (Cue Mozart in Amadeus proclaiming there are just the right amount of notes) Sadly it is often the case that a cluttered, unfocused arrangement can tie the hands of a mixer to a massive degree and some careful pruning would actually yield an astonishingly improved result.

So why does this occur? How does this parts explosion get started?

1.) Emotional attachment to parts

Artists are humans and as such they have emotions and feelings. Creative people are often very in touch with these emotions and use them to fuel their creative habit. The problem is that they can get very attached to parts throughout the writing process, even to the detriment of the track as a whole. They vividly remember the 6 hours of pain and misery trying to record that guitar solo, even though its going on at the same time as the lead vocal and blocking out the singer's tasteful vibrato.

2.) Lack of understanding of the function of parts

Often song-writers like the sound of a part but do not really understand the function it would play in a full arrangement. Each part should add something to the arrangement without stepping on other part's toes but also crucially adding to the full during of the arrangement. A part might fit beautifully at a certain point but could be to the detriment of the track when considered chronologically. Consider a crowded verse part when the chorus is crowded as well. The chorus will not soar, because of the verse part's fullness. It will sound weak in comparison.

3.) Good sounds in isolation

Sounds, when isolated, can often sound very good. The problem can be that they don't sound good in the context of the rest of the track. One particularly bad culprit for this is synthesiser patches. The point of many patches is not mix well but to advertise the sonic capabilities of the synth.

4.) Saturated ears

Often listening to the same parts of a song over and over, while writing, can lead to recognising the song in that form. A sort of over-saturation occurs because the brain can recall and latch onto that pattern within the song. This saturation leads to an inability to see the song as anything other than exactly what it is currently. The tendency of the songwriter is to then try to mix exactly that, and not consider other arrangement choices, which might yield better results.

Personal Reasons

I have personally come across this issue, within my own musical work, largely due to the my particular musical background. I am originally a guitar player, who picked up all the instruments I now play later. I started, fairly early on, recording on a computer and playing along with a metronome. I played in bands for a while but this became less and less a part of my musical life compared to solo work. It was only much later in my musical life that I had the confidence to start recording my own vocals.

As a guitar player my tendency is always to create music on guitar and then try to shoehorn the guitar parts into every bit of the track. Electric guitars in particular can suffer from a lack of dynamics if played from the top of the track to the bottom. They also eat up the frequency range like nobody's business. As such they are a fast track to creating mixes with no space to play with for other parts.

On top of this because I create the music, usually, before the vocals I almost always don't leave space for them in the mix. I create the track as if it was finished, including parts that are functioning as lead parts. Then when I do record them they sound thin and horrible because they are being crowded out. Everything sounds muddy and the mix never seems to sit in a way that blends.

Solution

The solution to this problem is something mixerman, in his book "Zen and the art of mixing" coined "Underdubbing". Essentially this means dropping parts when you have the full mix available to you. Its a simple process of editing yourself, judiciously. If the part doesn't add something, remove it. If the part detracts from another part, pick one or the other. Whenever I finish writing a piece of music and recording the vocals, I go back through it and remove anything that doesn't work, using the above two rules. I find that almost always the track becomes much much easier to mix and opens itself out. Reverbs have more space, delays and effects can be heard and often small details, that were being drowned out, come to the surface.

Possibilities

After a rough few days, and a lot of hard decisions I was struck by a thought as I walked up to my friend's house last night. The world often feels like opportunity is hidden behind a wall. It often feels like it's extremely difficult to get past barriers and the things you want are kept from you. What i'm actually realising is that often the capability to achieve the things you want is within most people's reach, its about effort and desire. What I mean by this is that when you have goals, the actual path to them is often not as complicated as it first seems. What holds us back, in my opinion, is that we often crave things that we don't want enough to follow the path to get them. The path is hard, but its not impossible, and this difficulty stops us taking it. For instance many people crave money. They seek a way to have a large bank balance, because they desire the particular life it will bring them. Very often the primary driving goal behind this desire is to be able to quit their jobs and live a life of leisure. The pragmatic path to doing this usually involves many risks. It can necessitate starting a business, going into property development and, crucially, can take many years. What people normally mean is they want that end goal, the money, now. They see successful rich people and assume that it must be luck. Yes, some get lucky but what you find is that those who have gotten rich by pure luck often set out with other goals than simply to be rich. The money comes as a consequence of their other desires and the work they put in to achieve them.

So what am I saying here? That we are all lazy slackers who want the world handed to us on a plate? No not at all. I am saying that humans are largely irrational beings who tend to crave. What these cravings often do is hide the things we actually want or need behind a haze of fleeting desires and a feeling of unfulfilled yearnings. The path to the things we really want can be absolutely gruelling, but because we really want those things that is a path we will gladly walk. At this minute in time I am writing this blog from my bed, still in my pyjamas. There are people in the world currently out climbing mountains and I genuinely could not force myself to get up and do that without breakfast, a shower, coffee etc but that doesn't mean i'm lazy. It means they have a goal and a desire to climb the mountain and it gives them some meaning to their life and their day. Other times I might want to be the mountain climber and they might be blogging in their pjs.

One, particularly insidious, side effect of this craving things we don't really have the motivation to achieve is envy, the green-eyed beast from the pits of our belly. We see someone with something shiny we want, in a better situation than ourselves, living our dream. The problem is again to do with timing and perspective. We have no idea what they have sacrificed for that which we envy. We don't see the path taken, only the end result and the pot at the end of the rainbow. We are viewing the last few pages of a book, without any notion of whether the preceding chapters are something we'd even want to read. Modern consumerism encourages this viewpoint of the world with credit, high interest loans and buy-it-now-to-save deals. Money is being made on people's envy by offering them a way to bypass the path to goals. Its a cognitive trick and people don't even realise they are being taken in. The problem is that all this actually does is place people on the path, but with no reward. The path is now harder, due to the downside associated with all shortcuts, and there is no payoff. In general if you couldn't take the 'path before goal' approach to something you desire, it might be worth questioning whether you even desired it in the first place.

An example from the last week came up when our boiler broke down. We have been living in our new home since last September and since then various parts of the house have started to break and need repair and replacement. It was really starting to get on top of me and the boiler going felt like the last straw. Replacing it with a new boiler will wipe out the last of our savings and leave us once again staring at a blank ledger to begin saving for any home improvements we want to make. My first reaction was to despair. I was pissed off and really not able to handle the situation. I went out for a walk and on my walk my mind cleared a bit. I realised that I could actually cut quite a bit out of my budget each week from things like buying breakfast on the way to work and ordering take-aways etc. These were things I had largely being doing to deal with the pressure I had been feeling, I comfort eat a lot. I thought about it and what I really wanted was to fix the boiler and get the house done up as i'd like for me and my family. The idea of giving up treats from my daily schedule seemed terrible but not when I weighed up how badly I wanted to not be worrying about how we were going to fix up the house. So we sat down and looked through the budget and realised that we can have most of the things we want done in a couple of years, just by cutting back on these extra little tit-bits (starbucks coffee, I am no longer your bitch). Its not like i'm even losing the treats, i'm just bulk buying them, taking them with me and not falling prey to commuter prices for things like a morning roll. The path is difficult, but the end goal is something I truly want so I take it without issue.