8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: play and learning

  • Ten of Diamonds

    Jokingly I would tell people who liked my photographs that I was not so excellent at taking pictures as they suspected: after all, I only ever showed them the good pictures.

    But then it wasn’t exactly a joke, either. 

    See, I think there is a difference between expertise and amateurism, and explaining it is tangled up in my own creative efforts. I am an amateur artist, an amateur photographer, an amateur musician. And I am confident in claiming so because the difference between amateur and expert work isn’t always the output, but rather the effort required to be consistently good at the form. 

    I can make good stuff. But I am admittedly inconsistent.

    In photography I called it my one-in-ten rule: if I took ten pictures, one of them was generally pretty good. Again, I could make good stuff, just inconsistently.

    Inconsistency has a way of nipping you in the backside when you take on a gig to photograph an event, or are asked to sketch with an audience, or need to stand on a stage and play an instrument. Noodling in your basement and occasionally having a terrific night is fundamentally different from  performing on demand. One is the realm of amateurs with wisps of talent, the other is the domain of experts.

    And really. I don’t mind being the diamond in the rough, but admitting there is often much more rough than diamond is also about admitting that you can do these crafts for merely the enjoyment of them, too, and that’s not a joke at all.

  • Comic Sounds

    I am no musician. 

    I’m not trying to be humble, but merely to tell you that despite being moderately okay at three instruments, being able to read music, and having a respectable recording studio hacked together in my basement office, I am really just dabbling in what most people would consider proper musical creativity.

    And I’m okay with that.

    I am trying to learn, strapped for access to resources and time and patience, at least the kind granted to a guy in his late forties who most people feel should either already be good at this kind of thing or should stop “acting like a kid” and do something more serious than compose jittery jams in his pyjamas. 

    I used to recap an essay I once read about the font Comic Sans. You know it. It’s the most hated font in the design world, the free comic-book-ish font that came with Microsoft Windows long ago and shows up on “fun” corporate posters designed by people who don’t design for a living. I defended that font: people who use Comic Sans, I said remembering that essay, are thinking about design. They are arguably, well, just not great at it… yet.

    They are no designers. 

    But they are trying…the same way I am trying with music, art, and a dozen other creative pursuits. And rather than make fun of anything designed with Comic Sans, perhaps we should be thinking of it instead as a teaching opportunity. We should be thinking of it as made by someone who’s mind is open to the possibilities of creative expression.

  • 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.

  • Playtime

    In my efforts to learn the eclectic collection of music equipment that has arrived in tiny boxes to my front door since the new year began, I have been playing.

    Literally. Figuratively.

    Isn’t it funny how we use the word “play” to describe the art of making music and also the act of having fun undriven by goal or purpose? I have been playing in both senses, making music in my office-turned-music-studio and also having fun generating soundscapes and beats and little songs undriven by any specific timeline or objective save learning the tools themselves.

    Everyday, for at least the duration that it takes to lay down a three minute track on my recorder, I string together all the pieces with all their snaking wired connections. It usually takes me a few tries, but I get a respectable starter loop going on the looper, I lean into an effect, and I start adding layers and layers and layers. Each day I come up with something new and interesting, and each day I record it because… well, why not?

    But it is all nothing more than play. Play to learn, yes. But just play.