Remix-apaloosa...

I've been ruthless.  Cutting things out, dropping levels of parts I thought were crucial to the song, only to find out how much better things sound without them, adding things in that basically completed the songs and ultimately cleaning things up and getting them ready for mastering.  I've also had some amazing creative spurts, born out of just simply clearing my head and starting fresh on these projects first thing in the morning, while at home alone with no one but the cat and the DVR to distract me. 

It's been great.  And it's made me have an epiphany about my work, specifically where I do it.  It matters to the overall quality of a creative session where it takes place.  I've known this for years on some level really but having two places where I do the bulk of my work has made me realize how important the where is.  My most prolific months to date can be attributed to being in a the most comfortable and, somehow simultaneously exciting place I had been in for years.  My apartment in Greensboro, NC on South  Mendenhall Street in the top floor of a beautiful hundred year old Victorian effing gingerbread house in the semester of graduate school immediately following my divorce and return to single life.  And most significantly, the first time I ever had a living space all to myself (with just a cat).  Starting back to graduate school was exciting, living in that place was incredibly healing and the future was wide open for the first time in my adult life.

Now, my life is still exciting (and getting more exciting every day), I live in another beautiful space, not quite as old, still pretty beautiful, and comparitively sizeable, still not entirely alone (though for most of the day and yes, still with the same cat) and I finally have most of the things I need for a pretty basic home studio, up to and including a damn comfortable chair.  Why would I trade that in for working on my music here at work, furtively shoving my earphones in between answering phone calls and emails, hoping that those famous lulls in activity can sustain themselves long enough for me to get something, anything done? 

Granted, I've found that I can get simple, remedial tasks done here in my down time but ultimately, there's nothing that beats being home and in my own space for creative work.  Those moments where the muse just speaks to you don't happen when you're not entirely focused.  You can't write when you're thinking about it in terms of "getting it done really quick before you have to be somewhere else."  It's so much better to approach the creative task when you actually have time to do this, so you're not thinking about how little time you have to complete something meaningful.  I find that this makes me manage my time much better because if I only have two full days off during the week to write and do creative things, I pretty much have to do my creative work on those days and get the projects up to a point where I can do whatever else needs to be done at work.  For example, if I'm writing out a score for something.  I write the music at home and input the basic idea into the computer while in front of the piano, then I take the score to work with me and add in dynamic markings and clean up the score and basically do anything tedious and mind numbing that I don't necessarily need the creative part of my brain for, or large amounts of focus.   

That said, 6 of the 7 have test mixes ready to go for the car ride on Saturday.  And barring some meteor strike, tidal wave, solar flare, pole reversal Mayan Apocalypse (which won't happen because it's really just the end of the calendar and not the end of the world), earthquake, super volcano, nuclear explosion, I'm sure the world will be around to hear my music get licensed to some film/tv show/commercial/documentary/something something as yet to be determined.  Rock and freaking roll. Daoust out.