8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Learnings

  • Dabbling

    The risk when taking on any new project is that it might all too quickly become another notch on one’s chalkboard of failed projects. The risk of dabbling is ultimately boredom and moving on to something else new.

    But how does one stop dabbling and start honing and refining—especially if one is inclined to be more of a dabbler than a deep diver.

    I admit, I am a bit of a shiny object guy when it comes to my hobbies. I see something new and interesting and I d dive deeply into it for a while—that is, usually, until I’ve learned enough about said shiny object that learning about it becomes less interesting than it was at the beginning. And then often, said shiny object goes on the shelf, forgotten. Dabbling done.

    To fight through and beyond the honeymoon period for any new project my tactic has generally been to use goals or public accountability or external commitments. It’s neither complex nor especially obscure. Signing up for a language class or telling everyone your running goal race or planning a trip to sketch in another country are examples of great counter-dabbling tools.

    These sorts of external motivators create a kind of reward system to overcome the raw dopamine drop when the innate rewards of dabbling fade. 

  • Wet Sounds

    Recent forays into musical experimentation with various electronic devices has taught me a new concept: wet and dry sounds.

    As I understand it, and simply, dry sounds are raw, clean and unprocessed audio coming directly from an instrument while wet sounds are sounds that have been enhanced with reverbs, echos, delays and other effects. The latter is usually achieved by the use of pedals or pass-through devices that are controlled by a musician for deliberately altering, distorting and otherwise enhancing the source audio.

    I bought a little low-budget synthesizer about a year ago and have had some enormous creative fun learning to first play it and more recently how to make music with the device.  But dipping into a world of music that I had little previous experience—at least as a creator—meant that I often found I was edging up against creative barriers that I didn’t know how to understand or articulate.

    Case in point: wet versus dry sounds.

    My synth is dry. And I have since ordered a pass-through device, a pedal, that allows me to add some of those wet features that I have been missing.

    My point: sometimes creating with what we know and what we have until such time as we reach a point when we notice the gaps is the best way to discover new concepts.