Retirement & The Bucket List

That list of things you want to do, The Bucket List.  

Like making my own comics:

I have now done most of the things I ever set out to do. Be involved with some technological worthwhile product, live and work overseas, make music, draw, sculpt, start my own (side) business, have a family and a few other things.

There are also a lot of things I never had any interest in, like Being Rich and Famous, performing on stage, a Tennis Pro or Golfer, so they haven't happened and I am very okay with that too.

Even have a Best Of Album on Bandcamp. But that wasn't something that was ever on my Bucket List. My desire was just to do music production, in my own studio, at a level I was happy with. The album came out of that.  

Retirement itself was never on my bucket list.  Retirement wasn't something I ever thought about till just weeks before I did it.  And that I would retire to Japan wasn't either.  But giving up full time work had such a huge impact on my life. A huge stress was removed from me.  Hadn't seen that coming.

Gave me an opportunity to really think about what I like and don't like and what comes natural to me, and is comfortable.  I have come to embrace my true Introvert self, and be content.  Making something in my small studio is bliss. It is also something that doesn't really cost anything.

During my working life, I travelled overseas a lot. Catching an airplane somewhere now is not what I want to do. But I do love going somewhere up to a couple hours away by train, and Japan really is a place to do that in comfort.

Retirement has been a chance to wake up and think, "what do I want to do today?". Sometimes that is just hangout with our cat, at other times build and paint a model, go to an Art Exhibition, go to a Cafe and Drink Coffee while listening to my music player, or play with a synthesizer.  

There are lots of things happening around the world that I can get really upset about, but I also have no agency over any of them. Nothing I can do has any impact over them at all, even if I have drawn a cartoon or two pointing out some of the stupidity.  Generally I have found there is no good side to even thinking about them. It saves my mental health to not follow what is happening and pretty much ignore the foreign news. That keeps me a happy camper.  

Hope you get the opportunity to be able to do what makes you content.

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Concert Ticket Lotteries

 

First time to experience the e-plus ticket lottery system, in my attempt to get to the Freak Kitchen Osaka concert, with opening act 六合 / Rikugo .

But unlike a Lottery, you don't pay anything unless you actually get drawn to buy a ticket.

A musical ditty threw together this afternoon. REAPER DAW, Simmons SDS-V drum vst, 8 string guitar and VITAL for bass and additional u-he synth melodic/siren thing...

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Sanjo II 3000 Kyoto Japan

 

Not an Ambient Piece. 

A throw away 1:40 thing from this morning, recycled this evening 😀. But with JP8 rather than Church Organ, and 16th note sequencer bass synth. Repeating 8 bar A Lydian parts for JP8 and bass.  Threw in a Black Metal drummer, over playing a Simmons SDS-V 😮, to keep the Ibanez GRG7221QA-TBB 7 String guitar thru a Line 6 UBER METAL pedal company.

Spent all of 5 minutes with GROK and prompts around "Sanjo Kyoto Year 3000".  Hope it is never built up like this, and anything new needs the taste of a Syd Mead if they do.

Put together in MOHO PRO12 Animation system as it really fast and simple to do this, and way easier than my Video editor Vegas Movie Studio.

This uses the same sounds as the other things I have done in the last 2 weeks since getting the Simmons SDS-V vst Electronic Drums sim.  Love the metal guitar tone too.

Part of me feels there should be a blistering guitar solo with pick scrape, sweep picking and two handed taping of some interesting arpeggios,  but I really like a simple riff or melody to hum.  No one hums a blistering guitar solo with a zillion random notes in it.  

I would normally just put an image of the audio waveform in a video like this, but had the random idea to use AI future Sanjo Kyoto instead.  It takes less effort than preparing the audio waveform!

AI has so many problems. In this case, I have no idea where the training data for these city images came from, but do know you can't copyright them.  In this case, it would have taken me weeks to paint images similar to these, and so I wouldn't have done it. In Grok it was all of 5 minutes, which is fine for a disposable little video 10 people will ever watch.. Would have done a manga like scene instead, as the ROI to do it isn't worth it. 

The music is the main thing here, but I didn't really take any time to do that in this case either. There is nothing stereotypically "Japan" about the music at all.  BIGBOSS KYOTO   is at Sanjo Kyoto which has a nice collection of very metal guitars, so I don't see this as out of place at all.

Also recently learnt about Rikugo 六合 a Kyoto Prog Metal "Dark Rock" band, and have been listening to their material the last few days. They are the support band for the September Freak Kitchen Japan Tour.  Girl Punk band Otoboke Beaver おとぼけビ～バ～ are also Kyoto natives.

So to me, heavy/ metal music is very much a part of Kyoto.

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Vital Inspiration

We got around to assigning the Akai PMD218 pads to the right drums, and also making our own preset for the VSDS-X Simmons drum vst. That all makes a difference. 

Then stayed inside all day and made two pieces of music and accompanying videos on this cold, slightly snowing, sometimes sunny Kyoto today after a very busy day out yesterday, where we ended up having some lovely Ramen at a place in Kyoto JR station.

So is this 1980s music sounds with a 1960s cartoon vibe, I wonder?:

It wasn't just the right pads and sounds that were inspirational though:

I would have loved to attend this local car show if I had know about it.

As I put in our Memoires Comic, it set a career direction for me.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

All Just Play

 

Watched the Hans Zimmer Beato Interview and he said something I think about myself every so often.

Musicians don't retire as what they do is play (and have fun).

Not exactly his words, but his meaning. 

I "retired" 6 years ago now from my engineering/technical career.  I originally went down that path as it was an audio engineering hobby I turned into my career. But I don't do that any more, it became just work, the job, and even if there was satisfaction in making something, it was just a job. 

The music stuff I do now, to almost no views or plays of the things I release, is the result of my playing with my very inexpensive music instruments and Reaper based DAW. Consider myself a Producer and not a Guitarist. It is all just Play, and even if getting no Bandcamp or YouTube plays doesn't feel great, it is the playing with the gear, solving musical puzzles in time (a bit like Tetris isn't it? ) that is fun and rewarding, and I don't need any financial reward for doing it. It was never my career, and I never tried to make a living at it.  The capabilities I have in my tiny studio with a Reaper based DAW and being able top release stuff on Bandcamp and YouTube makes this the best time for a hobbyist like myself.  But that is partly as I don't need to make any money from music or my comics.  I only ever bought music making gear out of the money I earned from my Illustration work, not from my tech career. Seemed appropriate. 

Not my only Play things though. Making comics, drawing and going to exhibitions and sitting in cafes drinking coffee, and a few other things, is play to me too now. I had never thought about retirement, but very happy to be in the position I am now.

My latest Music Video above is extended from a music+comic I recently did about Osaka Expo 2025.  This track is twice that length and has more parts though.  The Track EXPO on Bandcamp is another, just take it track.

Getting the Simmons SDS-V vst has been a little inspiring, even if the last 3 tracks have pretty much the same drum track!  That sound and distorted guitar, and synthesizers is a very 1980s sound I think, and I love it. Had so much fun have ordered an Akai MPD218 pad controller and see if that sparks some different finger drumming world to me. I have no desire to learn to play real drums at this stage of life, so a V-DRUM kit is not required, even if I did give it a second or two of thought... 

I still use Winamp to play my music on the PC, but rarely use the visualizer in it.  But after thinking about how to put this track EXPO on YouTube, and do something different from my previous videos, it seemed an old school and cool thing to try. Used OBS to capture the visualization, then resynced the audio to the master track and added title and watermark in MAGIX Movie Studio.   

All Just Play.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

The Love Of Electronic Drums

 

During the mid 1980s when I was designing complicated 16bit digital audio systems, I was fascinated with Simmons style electronic drums, and designed my own analog/eprom based system.

I made a playable kit around a guitar stand,  a kick drum pedal and 4 pads on a sheet of MDF about 35cmx25cm. A pad being:  piezo sensor glued to 15x11cm 3ply with a thin rubber layer on top and 4cm foam on the bottom attaching it to the main MDF.  Kick drum support was aluminum angle.

My design was about minimizing stick noise in a tiny practice kit with a big sound. I lived in a small rented apartment and making any noise was out of the question. Still have the drum sticks, but threw away the rest many years ago. For a time, practicing with this was a lot of fun, and a real eye opener has to how difficult playing drums really is. 

In the 2000s I tried to buy a used Simmons SDS5 to SDS8 on ebay a dozen or so times, but was never successful. They sold for the kind of money I didn't have. 

When I much later started using the Toontrack DRUM KIT FROM HELL vst, I realized the provided drum patterns, developed from a real drummer playing an electronic kit made such a big difference to how my tracks sounded.  I rarely make my own drum patterns now, but when I do , I may play part of the them on a small keyboard, then edit with a mouse. 

Finger drumming is now a thing, and completely bypasses the acoustic noise issues any kind of electronic drum pad set makes.  I have never tried one though.

I have used a few SDS5 drum samples in my tracks since the beginning. But I still surprised myself when I finally bought the VSDS-X vst a few days ago.  Known about that for years.

I just still love that "sheep kicked in the stomach" sound.

The above Music Animation started with me playing the drums on my KORG microKEY32 keyboard. Then adding a FM Bass to that. At first it was just 2 synths, but added 2 guitar tracks later, and that is the version here.  

The main image is an AI thing saw on Facebook. Sure I read AI isn't copyrightable, so took that and edited to be the mysterious outcrop here. Just the vibe of the thing. red triangle probe done in MOHO Pro 12.

Another:

This uses some AI images I asked GROK for.  AI has huge problems with using it, even if used as a texture generator like here.  

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology