8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [04] Tools & Troubles

Finding your medium of focus through words, images, and pretty much everything in between

Chapter List

  • Tools Troubles

    Fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan told the world that the medium is the message[1], and I have long taken that to mean that it is as valuable to study the tools and techniques as the final product if we are ever to understand the whole.

    The artist can easily get lost in the tools, though. Photographers can bang on about their camera specs. Writers can wax poetic about their favourite keyboards. And musicians these days it seems are just as apt to post content about the subtle tonality differences between brands of violin strings as share their music.

    Yet, creativity is and always be an intimacy with the tools and techniques. The art and the mechanisms that enable it are inseparable and interwoven as two things can be. 

    Maybe that’s why we get hung up on the medium and the message and often confuse the effort to concentrate on them both with the attention they deserve. 

    Or maybe I just like writing about my toys and I am going to devote some space on this blog to share my thoughts about keyboards, cameras and violin strings. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

    Under the category of Tools & Troubles, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Junk Drawer

    I have a collection of jars and each of them are filled with a mismatched array of screws left over from a long list of household projects: building our backyard deck, fixing the fence, installing drywall in the garage, assembling a doghouse with the kid, and a long list of other things I’ve long since forgotten. 

    Whenever I need to fix something, work on something or the urge strikes to connect two pieces of wood for some reason, I rummage through the screw jars and inevitably I find what I need.

    I hadn’t realized that not everyone does this. I assumed that it was just a universal trait of the average, everyday, homeowner: keeping a jar or two of mismatched screws on the shelf for those just-in-case moments.

    But no, and rather I have started to believe that it is more the habit of the creatively minded. A jar of screws has the potential to be useful in the future. And in the same way I also keep loops of string and bits of interesting wood I find on a walk or a bag of curious stones from the river or lists of writing ideas or recordings of curious sounds or introspective thoughts that lead to no where in particular… at least not yet.

    But maybe someday that junk will be worth more creatively than the collection itself.

  • MIDI Controller

    I broke, and I finally bought a dedicated MIDI controller.

    It was not an expensive one. Nor is it a toy. It is, rather, a very basic and simple twenty-five key computer keyboard that has piano ivories instead of numbers and letters. It makes no sound of its own. It just sends electronic signals to another device, as if I was typing musical notes.

    If you had asked me a year ago what I knew about musical keyboards I would have told you there were pianos …and electronic pianos …and—I am reluctantly admitting here that I hadn’t been paying much attention after that point. 

    I like synth music, and growing up we didn’t have a real piano or a fancy keyboard, but rather a simple department store brand electronic synth with a couple dozen built in instruments. In our house now, my wife has (because it is hers from before we were married) a pretty nice digital piano in her office, and a little over a decade ago we acquired a small upright piano, too, which sits in our kitchen and serves little other purpose than to remind me of a decade of the kid doing piano lessons. But, the concept of a bed of black and white keys that makes sounds? That was pretty clear in my head.

    For myself, those pianos were never quite what I needed. What I was craving, musically speaking.

    Instead, I went down the synthesizer rabbit hole a little over a year ago now and learned that a proper synth is more than a piano keyboard that makes funny sounds, but rather a way to generate and manipulate sounds with electrical or digital tools, and for which a piano-style keyboard is merely a comfortable and familiar user interface. 

    Now I’ve gone full circle. I own a small keyboard controller to interface with the synth software on my computers, and I am learning more about how it all works with each visit to this world of music and sound …and most importantly, a new personal exploration of audio creativity.

  • Musical Motif

    One of the ideas I have about my most recent writing project is that the end goal is not (merely) a novel.

    I want to make an audio story.

    Back as far a my university days I had it in my mind to try to make an audio drama in the style of H2G2[1] or Ruby[2].  

    I went about it completely backwards, of course, trying to improv a script while learning all the audio tools. I would get five minutes of groovy sound effects wrapped around a nothing script and then quit because I had never done any planning. I was using borrowed sounds and music in free software I had very little knowledge of how to use and making up a science fiction story on the fly. It was a recipe to accomplish nothing—except maybe learn from my mistakes.

    So I’ve been working on a story first.

    But also…

    In the last couple years I have built on the knowledge I had around music theory and audio software and have started to learn the basics of music production. I have been acquiring the tools—mics, synths, mixers, recorders, and recently an effects pedal—to produce my own soundscapes. 

    And? This week I actually wrote a song. Well… actually the technical term is called a leitmotif. It is the basic building block of a recurring musical theme tied to a character, place, group, or whatever. And… I wrote one.

  • Developing Vocally

    I want to get better at recorded voice work. Maybe for the purposes of making a podcast. Maybe because recording an audiobook from my stories is on my dream list. Maybe just improving my microphone presence seems kinda important if ever I need to do another video job interview.

    I consulted the wisdom of the internets and not counting the long list of technical adjustments and microphone setups and rules for fine tuning the recording equipment, it gave me three points to focus on to hone some of my own voice skills:

    Warming Up, which is to say doing vocal exercises for three or so minutes prior to attempting to record anything, which includes exercises like humming, trilling or reciting tongue twisters.

    Speaking for the Microphone, or as it suggested, exaggerating consonants, enunciating, and speaking more slowly than one would speak to a crowd or when having a conversation.

    Listening Back, by stopping after thirty seconds or a minute of trial recording and examining the effort like a critic, not critically, but with an aim to notice vocal tics, breathing, pacing, and other flubs.

    Practice, as they say, makes perfect.

    And if not perfect … well, then at least my microphone will get some extra use this month.