Let me try a thought here. I don’t know if it’s true, but let’s see. I’d like to believe that few of our daily activities are that difficult, there are a lot of things we can learn and master. Yet, the mistake we keep making is believing these things are easy.

This may sound like a play with words, but I believe there’s something here. When we believe things are easy – what do we do? We try to do it with our left hand, while doing something else with our right. Not really paying attention. And when the end-result isn’t satisfying we say that X is a very difficult activity.

There may be exceptions, prodigys – talents that just seem to “get it” from an early age, but I believe that more often than not, it’s the attention to detail and dedication to learning and improving that separates masters from the average.

Things seem difficult when you haven’t put in the work.

We’re winging it, more often than winning it.

Yesterday I was in a hole. A familiar hole. All relating to my art and my disability to get things done. I don’t intend to use this space to whine about my misery. But since this feeling is all too familiar I want to understand what triggers it and what I can do about it.

Hope and the lack of it seem to be central for my level self-confidence as an artist. I feel hopeful when I’m making progress, when I’m learning new things which allows me to create something that to me is new. Keeping good habits seem to give me hope too. I may be slow but inch by inch I’m getting there.

It also seems that when I lose my structure, it all falls apart. I don’t get anything done. I’m not moving forward, but backwards and suddenly all my sketches and ideas feel dumb, uninspiring – and suddenly music is not a powerful force of joy, but the reason for my misery in life. It’s the hole of hopelessness and self-pity.

On the other hand it’s funny how a little spark of light can bring hope back. At midnight last night I refused to go to bed with the bad feeling so I decided to see which of my Empress Zoia-patches that benefit most from getting Midi-sync. So I jammed a little on a track. And I got the vaccine I needed. I discovered something beautiful that touched me and music was all great again.

It actually sounded great this morning too. Back to habits.

The resistance it’s called by Steven Pressfield in the book The War of Art. The procrastination, the postponing, the reluctance to get going. It’s funny how I time after time find myself facing an uphill slope to do creative work. And yet, more often than not it’s a lot easier than it feels to get going. Having a plan or a checklist with simple easy tasks is helpful. But, I don’t really need to know what to do. If I just do, in a few minutes I will know what needs to be done. Some idea will pop up and take care of itself.

In the beginning of this year I made a summary each week. It’s interesting that when planning my work I seem to calculate with my highest productivity rate. Right now I really feel like I have to fight to keep momentum. The idea that finishing one song per week would be possible … is almost foreign to me now.

Week 8 feels like it was a cleaning week. I sorted through a lot of the messiness in my studio, wired up some stuff. I recorded parts for an uptempo track, but it seems mostly I’ve been in a somewhat slow lyrical mode. That is, I’ve been trying to write lyrics but it’s going slow. I also felt really tired with some kind of headache – and in these times, I almost got a bit hypo-chondric.

So, I’m working on two different Mannheim EP-songs. One is the uptempo-track mentioned above and is about biking, or the feeling of biking. I made a “motorik-beat” pattern on my OP-1 and sent it through DigDugDIY compressor/bitcrusher. Over it I’m strumming/singing a song which in my head has some of the energy of an uptempo Beach Boys-song. I’ve also playing with the idea of letting some synth have a conversation with the riff in Kraftwerk’s Tour de France. I’m unsure about how close to go for copyright reasons, but it’s interesting to see that Kraftwerk lifted the first half of the riff from Sonata for Flute and Piano by Paul Hindemith. Working title? Let’s call it Sturm&Drang for now.

The second song is called Endless. I view it as some kind of anchoring theme song for the EP. It’s a slightly jazzy ballad. My idea is to record different parts with different instrumentation.

Plan for week 9. Finish the lyrics for Endless and “Sturm&Drang”. Get “skeleton structures” recorded into Live so I can experiment. I want to fill up my session view with more experimental loops. I’m also working on a song called Summerhands and I want to write a song about a canary yellow convertible on the autobahn.

Without even having read BJ Fogg, I still had a few a-ha moments watching different youtube-clips. One such was the insight into the environment’s importance for our succeeding with great habits. At home I’ve been fighting a losing battle at keeping the kids off the screens (phones, ps4, tablets, tv). I long ago realized that it’s impossible to ask a kid to stay away from candy while having them live in a candy store. In the same way, sober alcoholics would benefit from better company than hanging out with their old drinking buddies at bars.

Continue reading →

As I wrote a few weeks back I thought it seemed like a good idea to set up a few rules for this blog. My self-censorship somehow related to me seeing people subscribe, which made me feel responsibility not to spam. Well what happened was that I stopped writing. So I’m lifting all regulations to roam free again.

It’s ok to drift off-course, to fall off the horse or fail with any other metaphor. At least it’s what I’ve come to believe. The resilience comes from the ability to pick yourself up and get started again. I knew the music side of me would lose steam in February, life and snow gets in the way.

Continue reading →

I believe I made up some rules for my blogposts last week. Unfortunately, I’m breaking them already. My home studio is really messy at the moment, and I think it probably is a good reflection of what my mind is like. Doing a full time synthesis-course parallell with dayjob, family and an EP-project is a bit too much. At least, I’m doing ok with the synth stuff. I’ve handed in two VCV-assignments and had them approved.

The last weeks I’ve spent a lot of time strolling down memory lane for my Mannheim EP-project. Thinking of how different moments, situations and locations. Different people and impressions and what to write songs about. A few days ago I came up with a quite jazzy, Sinatra-style song. For now, the working title is Endless and I’m really happy about it.

Continue reading →

Having a studio with many small boxes means… lots of boxes, lots of cables everywhere. So, every once in a while I try to look for a smarter way to get organized.

So, a shelf above the desk was needed. An angled shelf seemed the best for visibility and being able to see and control the gear there. I looked around for angled consoles, but I didn’t really find any. Or they were too expensive. So, in the meantime I put up a horisontal shelf like below. Didn’t really work.

Continue reading →

There is Veni, Vidi, Vici. And then there is the opposite. He didn’t come. He didn’t see. He lost. Which was very much the feeling tonight as I drove home from the studio/rehearsal space that I share with some people. A Caesar dethroned with his laurels in the stew, a hung-over toga party – stabbed not by a microbrute, but my own ability to suck.

Actually, I managed the Veni-part. I showed up. I got to the studio. And sometimes shit happens, or you happen to be shit. It’s ok, I guess. There are other nights – of hubris and foolish triumph. Best are the days and nights that I just keep adding parts to songs and suddenly the song appears, completed.

Tonight I wanted to record acoustic guitar for a track on my Mannheim EP. The song is called Summerhands and is suffering badly from demoitis. It was originally written in C which had me singing at the top of my range, and not so angelic as I would have hoped. Still, as is the case with every song, there were a lot of lovely accidents in the production process which I now have no chance of repeating.

The idea tonight was to record it in G and to imagine the old attempts didn’t exist. I didn’t even check what the tempo was last time. It turns out I ended up pretty close. 94bpm instead of 95.7 last time.

This is not that interesting. Not for me, and not for anyone reading. I showed up. I didn’t win. I might have learnt something.

The important thing is process, not product. Every once in a while we slip. Two steps up, one step back etc.