Some Creative Days

 

Some days, the most creative thing to do, is just enjoy the warm sun on a REALLY cold day.

The bed gets the sun across it much of the morning, and our cat stakes out that spot in the last weeks.

You need time without constant distractions to recharge your creative battery. Today is such a day for me. 

Wife is out most of the day and I don't have anything I need to do, except whatever the cat tells me to do, that is.  I really can't call him "my cat", as it is very much a situation of "I am his human" .

So a time of rest and random thoughts.

Have been playing with the 8 and 7 strings, recording into Reaper, that I recently refined the plastic nuts on, and that has really made such a big difference to tuning process and pitch stability.  Have also adjusted the EQ and "C4 trick" for my metal tones and love the current sounds.   

Have also done a few Distorted Guitar, Synths + Sequencer music clips that combines the things I like in my own "original" thing. An ex-boss said "Reminds me a cross between John Carpenter and the Theme music for Beyond 2000! Sounds great!"

To me that is a great compliment.  A track in this style: 

I now need time to come up with the next thing to use that with, or direction to go, but I am in no rush. I have no fan demand to satisfy, no sales or play goals to meet, no follower base to grow, just my own internal creative forces to deal with. 

You just don't know what the future and events throw at you. Like I have had this terrible cough for over 11 days now. Better than it was, but still keeps me up at night. And coughing fits anytime mean I aren't going outside far at all much.

So a time of rest and reflection.

Just let those thoughts percolate. There will eventually be a "a ha" thought that I then move on with.

During a routine hospital visit, my grandfather fell in a hospital corridor then died during the emergency surgery he needed.  That day didn't go as he expected at all.

Some 8 years ago, when I had surgery, I had to sign that I understood anesthetic was dangerous for someone of my age. I think of my grandfather and his end, some 40 years ago now.  

Just random thoughts, because I can, and don't have to focus on anything.

There is so much highly opiniated, wrong stuff on the internet. You are most likely to read the fix for a sicky guitar nut is to immediately replace it with a bone or TUSQ one. Maybe the BEST solution, but the correct answer is to first dress the nut correctly with files. More than likely, all that is required.

For the 7 and 8 string guitars I have, seen so many posts about needing to replace the pickups, which is just all so extreme to me.  I am with Glenn Fricker on this. The issue isn't the pickups, but the EQ and gain applied to the guitar signal, mostly through the cabinet and speaker. I will say though, as I am after High Gain Metal tones, and not playing, jazz or covers of different bands of the last 30 years, my criteria is NOT as a session guitar player. I am also not playing into a LOUD, real amplifier, where inserting a boost pedal changes the response you feel when playing. The time I did replace a guitar pickup, it was to put a humbucker in the bridge of a Squire to kill the 50hz hum of the standard single coils in the metal tone I was after.  So my situation, DI in a tiny home studio with amp and cabinet sims gives me a lot of control. 

My background is as an electronics/ audio/ music engineer, so many myths "guitar/ audio/ recording/ HiFi truths" extolled on the internet are the rantings of wacko religious cults to me. 

A time of rest and reflection.

The late '70s tech industries I studied to get into almost don't exist now. HiFi is mostly gone, Recording Studios have mostly been replaced by the musicians home project studio and musicians, for the most part can't make a living being a jazz/pop/rock/metal musician.  I also loved the 1970s book cover artwork of paperbacks and album covers. All that has pretty much gone too.

But in 2025 I am grateful I can make my own music and art in my own tiny studio and release it to the world. Even if just for myself. Being retired and off the "must make money at this" treadmill allows me that freedom.

Those Swings and Round-Abouts...

A day of rest and reflection.

Then the very next day we did this in a few hours:

The Sony Walkman was the beginning of the end of "HiFi", and the iPod finished it off, where you could carry your whole record collection with you anywhere, and the sound quality was way better that the record players the mass market had. 

Another thing that doesn't exist any more is Hot Rod model car kits in 1/24 or 1/25 scale. I was a real fan in Junior High School.  More generally the boys hobby of building model kits, and the Hobby Shops you got them from has mostly vanished. GUNDAM in Japan seems a major exception though, but that is tied to the booming ANIME scene.  Expect computer games and other life style changes to blame for the end of kit building.

Hot Rods, of the crazy variety, have vanished too, even though they never really existed in Australia due to the road worthy rules they had.   

Rest and reflection.

Many people seem to expend much effort to be become "an influencer" or get a following on Social Media. Seems much like high school, where I was "over there out of the way" with one or two friends trying to keep away from the loud Know Nothings trying to be the center of attention.

Reflection

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