Like a composer...

Today I felt like a composer...and now I drink beer and write.  I have to be up tomorrow for the marathon day at both jobs, back to back, that I've been doing, to some degree, every week since end of April last year, but not until 8am...which is standard.  Really, I get up around 8 or 830 every day of the week.  If it's not work it's yoga.

So that leads me back to that whole bit about "time carving."  I decided some time earlier this week, before I even knew that I'd be able to move forward on the music for the trailer, that I should really just start setting aside music and VO days even when I don't have any current projects, and forego, one day out of my week, a yoga class that takes up two and a half to three hours of my time, factoring in the commute.  I did so today and I still had time to practice yoga this morning before getting started and I was able to sleep in until 9am...shit, I even snoozed.  And I meditated before hand, something I only manage to do otherwise if I make it to Yogaworks early enough before class starts that I can do it in the empty studio before anyone shows up.

Add to that, in addition to becoming a founding member of the Brooklyn Yogaworks studio (when it opens in a few months), I got a free six month subscription to their online yoga videos (which only costs $5 a month thereafter in addition to my membership fee).  Now, I should be more inclined to actually practice at home on these music and VO days.  And why the hell not?  I still thirst for that glorious routine that I cultivated on the retreat.  What an amazing thing to practice that much yoga, that consistently!

Back to the music, I feel so much more satisfied if I'm also pushing forward on music and VO stuff instead of just simply staying fit and making it to work on time.  At any rate, while I was at it, I managed to work up an extension of the music for the trailer today (which I tweaked even more later on at work), in order to cover the title card and credits that were added after the whole trailer was edited to mine and Amanda's song.  I can't wait until we post it for you guys to see.  It's looking and sounding great.

Otherwise, I'm back tweaking all the random mixes that I started up last year with the intent of submitting them to the licensing agency I signed with.  What the hell was I doing all damn year not submitting to them?  Oh yeah, chasing down a VO agent and working my ass off at three jobs.  Well anyway, that's why I reassess my goals and my methods every once in a while.  I've already marked off some time on Sunday for rearranging some of my voice demos and planning next steps etc.

But I digress.  The music for the licensing agency.  There are about 12 or 13 mixes floating around, unnamed and ready to be developed.  Plus, I'm thinking up new stuff all the time and I just need to be also sitting at my Macbook messing around and recording that stuff so that I can actually hope to complete something.  The good thing is, I've decided that one of those "mixes" (as yet unnamed), is ready to go...ish.  I need to extend it to a 60 second version.  Which shouldn't take too long at all.

With all that in mind, I need to sleep a little.  Marathon day tomorrow, remember?

Things I need to do...

It's late.  Ha!  It's always late when I'm writing these entries.  Shut up Tim and tell them about what's going on.  Anyway, I was just reminiscing and reading an entry from last year on this exact date (well, yesterday's date now).  For some reason I had a hunch there'd be some insight there.  I do this sometimes. I don't just re-read to reminisce but to gain perspective.  And sure enough, I was talking about making lists and my approach to starting tasks and allowing them to remain fluid so that I can alter my course once I get a clearer picture of what it will take to complete said tasks.  This also hearkens back to a more recent blog in the past few weeks where I was talking about the science of procrastination. 

When I wrote the more recent blog, I hadn't yet gone back and read the first one I linked and now I realize that, seriously, I was right in the second more recent blog....a lot of this stuff is innate.

That said, I know January is over a month away but regrouping at year's end and making to-do lists for the new year is on my mind again.  And starting projects, actually getting my ass moving again on a lot of things, is also on my mind.  So glad I re-read my blog about just getting started and being flexible with my approach to various tasks.

The things I need to do:

I've been thinking a lot about the licensing agency and how, since about a year has passed since they received my first batch of tracks and I haven't heard anything, I might need to increase my output to them.  I've also been thinking a lot about how these voice over practice sessions my coach has been organizing are really bringing out some great reads and I'm feeling much more confident (especially around other VO actors...I'd truly be interested in studying the psychology behind why a person seems to feel more confident in groups versus with individuals or even more confident with some individuals versus others...but that's another blog entry).  Indeed, some of these reads I'm producing at the practice sessions are worthy of going on the commercial demo which needs constant attention, of course.  But what else do they need?  You guessed it: Music.  But wait, I need to write some new music for the licensing agency anyway!

About a week ago, I took a look at all the products of my riffing over the course of the last year and selected which ones I could turn something into.  I was going to just systematically produce one after the other to completion but now, I realize it might be a fun project to just listen to the best reads that I've put out from those practice sessions and focus on writing music specifically for them.

Every previous run I've taken at improving my demos always felt rushed.  I would just go through my library of unused tracks and grab the closest thing.  But now, I can see how both avenues would benefit from me taking the time to essentially produce these ads from the ground up.  Writing music specifically for them would both give me the experience of composing for an ad again and would leave me with a finished product I could use on the voice over demos and that I could send to the licensing agency.

So there's the goal and I now have a starting point.  It's time to organize my thoughts on that one and project how long it would take me to get this done.  The idea is that it'll get me started with two, maybe 3, 30 second music bumps that I could also extend to 60 second versions that would both go on the VO demo and go to the licensing agency (remember it's a non-exclusive contract).  And then I would have the momentum, in theory to compose a few more and by early next year I could be sending a few more off to the agency and would already have a new commercial demo in hand.

Sound good?  I hope so.  That's all the eureka I can muster right now. I'm about a day away from being off for four days and I'm mentally checked out of about every other endeavor that isn't music or voice over right now.  And off for four days during which I do not have to travel anywhere.  All I have to do is bake another gluten free pumpkin pie and truck my ass out to Bushwick without the use of the M train.  The adventure continues...

New music uploads...

I finally decided tonight to go ahead and upload the tracks I recently finished mastering to my sound cloud page.  Wanted to give you all a chance to listen to what I've been working so hard on.  This is, of course, only the beginning.  I've composed about 12 new tunes since August as well, all of them in various stages of completeness, and all of them which will eventually go to the licensing agency as well.  

The tracks.  

Black and Blue are songs that I wrote for Steve Pitre for the Insiders1 Promo that he produced last year.    I liked the idea of making them sister songs and the color blue came to mind almost immediately when I thought about what to name Blue.  Black followed rather obviously.  The versions I just posted contain some new material not on the versions on the promo.  Black got more keyboard parts that I almost cut completely from the track originally (just developed them a little more).  Blue got some guitar parts with a wash of delay effects that had not previously existed.  

A Million Shades of Blue I wrote back in 2010 but knew I wanted to send to the licensing agency as soon as I started thinking about which pre-existing tracks I could repurpose.  I wrote the song one day starting from a riff that I came up with while playing around with new sounds in my Native Instruments synths (FM8, Absynth and Massive) and, as often happens, I didn't come up with a name for it until a few days later.  I was walking home from a friend's party at around 5am with the song running through my head and my eyes wandered up to the sky.  It being a little under an hour until sunrise, the sky was displaying this amazing indigo color that faded to black the farther from the eastern sky you looked.  The phrase "A Million Shades of Blue" passed through my head and I knew immediately that that's what the song was supposed to be called.  I can't remember if I wrote the keyboard part for this one before or after the name arrived.  It used to be played with just the Absynth patch, that screaming sound you hear underneath the keyboard.  I added the keyboard on this remix to give the melody more definition there and dropped the Absynth down in the mix to get rid of the muddiness I was hearing.  

Song for the Awakened was written all the way back in 2004.  I've always enjoyed the groove of this song and was particularly proud of some experimentation I did with truncating the groove before it could finish the measure and restarting it but not doing it the same in all parts.  I found that the phrases in each instrument could fit together in all kinds of different ways if I just let go of all conventional time signatures.  The mix on the old version troubled me greatly and I had to get ruthless with it.  This was one of the milestones during this project that I blogged about a few weeks back.  Getting a handle on the mix and actually liking the song again was a great boost to my confidence.  All it took was realizing that I had three instruments playing what one could handle and that there were large chunks of the song that didn't need both the keyboard and the guitar part to be fighting for attention.   Can't remember where the name for this song came from.  Think I was re reading passages in Radiant Mind at the time and the thought of being "Awakened" resonated with me a lot.  

Daresay was a favorite from the 2004 batch and I think it actually got released with Windy April and Pastel on iTunes a while back but I didn't really promote that incarnation of the Automatic Head/Disrupt moniker.   Daresay was a tune that I wrote in Fruity Loops entirely but this version used some sampled harp from Kontakt and my own guitar playing to spice it up.  Plus I used Kontakt to splice my own drum line up and create a breakdown drum part that I actually liked this time (vs. the old version that I felt I could never get right).  I wrote a blog a while back on my main page about how to do this with Kontakt and have used the technique a few times now.  Currently using it with the remix contest I'm working on, in fact. 

The last one I want to talk about was another new one from 2010 called Sleepwalking With You, a track written with Fruity Loops and transferred to Logic.  Another of the batch of tracks for the licensing agency that I had trouble with and then got ruthless with.  This one, not so much with the mix but with the decision to add other instruments.  I had written piano parts and several guitar parts that all got chucked one day when I just started using distorted guitar and the trademark backwards effect that I got from the Grain Delay box in Guitar Rig 5 and used on the score for "The Life."  That eureka moment sent the song into overdrive and made it among the first that I finished.  I can't remember why I chose the title Sleepwalking With You...maybe just that it sounds dreamy, like you're half awake, and the phrase sounded funny to me when it passed through my brain.  Now that I listen back with the distorted guitar it sounds like it might be, not sleepwalking, but a night terror.  But it does sound sort of mournful and wistful like you're dreaming about someone you've lost or that is not in your life anymore.  

That's about as deep as I'm going to get about it.  For now, I hope you enjoy listening to the tracks and that you've enjoyed this little insight into my compositional process.  Take care! 

Masters, licensing, upcoming concerts and nostalgia...

Just finished in the studio with my man Julian over at On Air Mastering yesterday.  The tracks sound great and I was incredibly eager to push through my copyright registration and send them off to Parma Licensing.  So, naturally, I took care of that right away.

They've received them as of this morning and should be reviewing them soon.  So, now I wait.  I'm truly excited about the opportunities this could open up for me but not without a healthy dose of impatience.  Healthy because it's motivating me to devour this list of other music licensing sites.  The idea being to spread my music out over the internet to get more simultaneous exposure.  After all, my contract with Parma is non-exclusive.

The article, which I can't remember how I stumbled on it...might have been one of the LinkedIn forums that I'm on, has been invaluable and whoever spent the time compiling the information, I thank you.  Now, I'm just trying to parse it all out and figure out which ones are worth my time.  Some do not offer royalties on placements, others require a minimum upload that I can't fulfill at present, while still others have a crappy payout split.  The list isn't necessarily exhaustive but I may just pick two or three good ones for now and delve into their terms and conditions and start making profiles if they're worthwhile.

So, that's keeping me busy.  But so is Lacy's music, which is nice.  We're trying to rehearse much more now because we're gearing up for a few shows.  I'm getting extremely excited about that actually.  Now, we have three shows planned, two of which are the CD release parties.  And I have my Behringer pedal cooperating with Mainstage and my Mainstage concert set up so that I can flip through the sounds for each song as well as turn on and off some of the effects with my foot.   All that remains for me to do is to get Mobius (my software looper) set up so I can start doing some of my own things with looping and layering.  Gah, I love playing live!

The first show is this one, performing at Caffe Vivaldi with the inimitable Tania Stavreva, who is in the process of completing her debut classical album (about which I'm so excited for her!).  That should be a good show.  Lacy and I are playing electric, too, so it'll be different from our open mics.

Next up is the Philly CD release party on the 17th of February at L'etage on Bainbridge and 6th in Philly, followed a few weeks later by the NYC CD release party on the 28th of February at Drom on 6th and Ave A in the E. Village.  Some of the players from the album have signed on to play with the band already so we're almost at a full band for this.  Both of us are really excited to rock out and can't wait to bring the new tracks to life.  Also being featured at both parties will be the premiere of the video for the song "Old Languages," directed by my good friend and colleague Mohammad Maaty.  So, if you can make either show watch out for that.  It's pretty awesome, I must say.

Now that all that's out of the way.  Some thoughts.  Just the other day, I received a piece of mail from my brother that was a rare memento he had dug up from the days of my first high school band, Buggstar (one g, two r's, no spaces).  A hand written history of the band by yours truly.  I read it back to back cover to cover (okay it was about five sheets of notebook paper), and I actually got a tiny bit wistful.  Just reading the way I talked about things back then, life seemed so much simpler.  It was before my dream of having a career in music had ever been tarnished by the harsh realities of the world.  And I talked about it as though it was a sure thing, as though nothing could stop me.  It was great to remember that I thought that way at one time and that somehow despite everything that came in way between now and then, I somehow got to where I am now.

It also made me miss my old band mates, hence the wistfulness.  We had such good times back then.  Throughout my parent's garage in boxes and probably amongst my brother's things are all these notebooks filled with songs and set lists and lyrics, chronicling our entire journey just about.  That was my first experience playing with other musicians.  It really came down to me, my brother and Jeremy, our singer...oh, and the six drummers we went through.  We recorded a bunch of stuff too, which is still around, on demo CDs and cassette tapes.  Cassette Tapes!  Boxes and boxes of cassette tapes.  I used to have a four track recorder that I would use to overdub tracks onto our demo recordings and come up with all kinds of stuff. While it wasn't the height of my composing career, I still like to go back and listen to them sometimes.  The songs were complex for what we basically were: a garage band.  But, nonetheless, I figure, what the hell?  Why not?

Here's one of my favorites from my sound cloud page.  Guitars: Tim Daoust, Vocals, Rhythm Guitar: Jeremy Shaner, Bass: Paul Daoust, Drums: the elusive Russell Foley...where are you kid?

Capitalize...

I spent yesterday evening upgrading some things on my Macbook, buying new software, etc.  Yesterday morning was an amazing yoga class and work was been pleasantly slow compared to my first day back on Friday.  It's a much mellower return to routine than I expected.  And now I'm getting ready for the upcoming year.  Scheduled some time at the mastering studio for next Thursday to master the audio for the licensing agency and I have a couple of rehearsals with Lacy next week as well.

It seems just like any other post Christmas run up to the New Year in that I'm thinking about resolutions, as you do.  Yet, I'm feeling so much more optimistic about 2013.  I got thinking about it after a general suggestion from my yoga teacher to not simply make resolutions but to decide what you wanted to bring with you into the new year and what you wanted to leave behind, i.e. what worked and what didn't.  2012 was probably the best year since I moved here and I can't think of much that didn't work except for a tiny bit of personal stuff.  I started the year out a little tame, not really being so aggressive and then, after that first voice gig (well the two in one weekend) came through, I realized what I had the potential to do.  So, I started taking charge of things and managed to get 8 more VO jobs, on top of scoring two shorts, three potential feature lengths that ultimately didn't pan out but showed that my name was getting out there, a promo, a PSA, another potential PSA that didn't pan out but helped me forge another connection, and a contract to license my music for film and TV.   At first, I was merely dragging myself through, saying I had to just keep at it.  But somewhere around halfway through the year, I started to realize that it was momentum and that I had to step it up and capitalize on it, not simply persevere despite how harrowing it can be waiting and waiting for that next gig.

So that's what I decided 2013 should be about.  Capitalizing.  Becoming more proactive with these opportunities.  Things I have happening for the first part of 2013 that I could capitalize on?

The 7 songs that I have going to the licensing agency are almost ready and their release will mean a lot of exposure.  Besides the opportunity for my work to appear in TV and film, producers looking for custom scores will be exposed to my music and may consider me for their projects as well.  Plus, it's a non-exclusive license so there's no saying I can't submit these to any number of other licensing sites.  I came across a great resource that reviews a ton of these sites and will start looking into placing my music with them as well.

Lacy and I are forming a band and planning concerts for the CD release party and beyond.  More full sets, more fully electronic performances, hence my delight at getting my laptop closer to being ready for live performance (finally!).  Meeting new musicians and getting out and playing live more will encourage me to start performing my own stuff once I'm more comfortable using my laptop to do so.  And those who knew me back in high school and college know how much more alive I feel when I'm playing music.  It's one of the things I enjoy most in life.  I am most comfortable in my skin when I'm performing and in my element.  The prospect of doing it again lights me up like you wouldn't believe.

The voice over world is about to get smacked upside the face by my voice.  My promo demo is the next step.  Once in the can, I will finally be ready to start testing out voice over agents in earnest.  And if I can keep up the momentum from last year (even from these last few months of auditioning and people finding me on the web without me having to do much marketing), I'm sure I can make some strides even in just the first few months of the year.

And not as talked about is the fact that I scored two great films last year that I'm really proud of and as soon as they are done, I have even more material for the film scoring reel.  That'll be five solid films that I've scored, plus one promo and a PSA just this year, since I moved to NYC four years ago.

Yes, I said four years ago.  I'm rounding up. I'm still not used to saying "three years ago," to be honest. Time is just flying by it seems.  Just under four years ago I'm came to the city and unceremoniously fell out of a Uhaul truck onto the pavement on 42nd Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn not really knowing if any of this was possible but being extremely excited to be trying it out.  And four years later, I still love this city and wouldn't rather be doing this anywhere else.  Not even LA, where so many people have suggested I should be for film scoring.

But I digress.  Tomorrow's New Year's Eve and I'll be here at work until midnight thirty, at which point I may head to some as yet undetermined bar where I will ring in the New Year Central Time.  Or something like that.  And welcome a new year which I will predict will be as awesome as this one or better.

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. 

Turning anything around...

The remix project almost ate my brain last night.  I have been working on mainly VO things for a few days and, as such, it had been a while since I really took a listen to every track to see where I am with them.  So, last night I did just that while in my last hour of work at NY1 and had a minor freak out because nothing was sounding like I remember it sounding.  I needed that experience to happen though because it made me realize I may have been cutting some corners and making concessions.

This morning, instead of going to yoga, I opted to stay in and work before mine and Lacy's rehearsal.  I pounded my way through every track with a mind to taking a realistic look at what needed to be done on each to bring it to completion (or at least to get them ready for mastering).  There was one track in particular that was just in shambles yesterday night.  Moving MIDI and audio over from Fruity Loops to Logic so I could use new instruments and drum samples was giving me discrepancies between the project tempo and the tempo of the actual files.  Logic was reading them at 138.somethingsomethingsomething when they were bounced out of Fruity Loops at 140 BPM.  I wasn't liking the bass sound, I wasn't liking the new parts I had written on guitar, and I was getting ready to scrap the whole track and leave it for a later offering to the agency.

But something happened this morning.  Something about my mindset when I was composing.  I was already tidying up a little around the apartment and trying to set up my guitar amp to use it during rehearsal instead of using my desktop monitors so I think my mind was a little more organized in general.  I got up at around 8am to begin all of this, had a shower and a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs, arugula salad and gluten free toast and a cup of gunpowder green tea, so I was fresh and clear-headed.

Now, I'm listening to the result of all the extra tracks and the tweaks to the placement of the bass notes and even a little cleverly placed break in the drum track and it sounds AWESOME!  I can't wait to post up the new version.  This one and the others.

I also had an epiphany about one of the songs.  The mix on a song called "Song for the Awakened," that's been written and finished for years now, was really really muddy and I couldn't place it.  Really, I hadn't even begun to start ruthlessly dropping instruments out of the mix and, after showing it to Lacy, I finally just muted this one part (a secondary guitar part), and everything sounded so much clearer.  I had also had three different synths playing basically the same part, but several days ago I had decided to just use one keyboard sound that encompassed all the sounds I had been trying to achieve.  Now, the only thing left is that the bass line is a bit busy and overwhelms in parts.  So, there may be some rewriting to be done in there.

And that's just the thing.  I wasn't keen on rewriting any of it because I'm in a rush to get these songs in to the agency.  And why?  No reason.  They even told me to take my time.  So, I should, right?  I want these to be good.  I want people to want to use them.  So I'm not going to submit shit so I can say I was prompt about it.  No.  So why not take the time to craft something really good instead of saying I don't want to rewrite or re record things because it'll take time.  I should be taking time.

Hell, taking another stab at rewriting the track I was talking about earlier "Sleepwalking With You" (an older version is on my soundcloud page), turned out to be so satisfying today, I'm thinking about just not worrying if these aren't all done by the end of the week.  I had envisioned getting them all finished so that Lacy and I could listen to them on the ride to NC this weekend.  Now, I'll just see what I can get done.

I'm just glad I was able to clear my mind and turn it all around in just a few focused hours this morning.  Before I was freaking out a tiny bit about the quality of my work and whether or not I should even be submitting half these songs.  But I don't need to go down that road.  That'd be wholly unproductive to listen to those voices.

With that said, I'm going to get back to it and see what else I can get done tonight.

Me and My Lists...

It's turned bitter cold outside recently and winter seems in full swing.  My radiators never start hissing until the mid morning hours when I'm just waking up, so it's often chilly in my bedroom.  I guess this is how I know it's winter.  And I'm just thankful that I have radiators to begin with.  I can't even begint to fathom what the city's less fortunate and the hurricane victims are going through. And it's only going to get worse...might even snow again this week.  

Now, Thanksgiving weekend is already a memory and I'm gearing up for a marathon December between all this remixing and mastering I'll be doing.  Then more voice coaching and hopefully, more voice gigs.  Also, Lacy and I are gearing up for the CD release parties which are only a few months away...dates and locations TBA, of course. For more information see Lacy James' website. :)  I plan to have the mastering done before the end of December at which point I will be sending the tracks off to the licensing agency.  My first batch. I won't say much more about Lacy's CD release because that's for her to announce.  This Friday I'm doing some voice over coaching with Sylvia which should be great.  I'm hoping to have a copy of the last gig I did for the young adult novel web ad to show her.  But we'll see. 

On top of all of that, I've already started my end of year reckoning and planning for next year's goals.  Lists of goals like these are great motivators.  I find them to be quite useful.  Part of the process of fabricating next years list of goals had me looking back at what I set out to do this past year and it's always interesting to see how many more I'm checking off as done than I did last year.  It was quite a few things.  Plus, the ones that I didn't check off weren't left undone necessarily, they just didn't turn out to be necessary or they were started but I realized that they were too ambitious for one year.  Things like finding a voice over agent.  In that regard, the lists can be fluid.  Voice over strategies have morphed a bit.  For instance, I found myself planning originally to email bomb a ton of production houses with my demos once I felt proud of them...but I think subconsciously I wasn't ever truly proud of them until I started racking up actual jobs to put on them.  Now that they're filled out with jobs I've actually done vs. random scripts I read in the studio specifically for the demo, I'm a lot prouder of what I'm putting out there.  Plus, without even using the demo to solicit more work in other places besides Voice123, I ended up averaging a gig a month for the last 9 months.  So, at some point along the line, I deemed it unnecessary to focus my efforts on soliciting production houses and instead hatched the plot to take my track record to an agent.  And now, I feel I'm still not ready.

So, using all of that, I fashioned a much more realistic checklist for next year, for both VO and music, to keep me on track and motivate me to bring them all to completion...or just about as close as I can get.  What's important is the trajectory, not necessarily whether or not I hit my target.  I'm always going to be getting closer and closer.

That having been said, and speaking of lists, I'm at a rather satisfying stage with the remix project now.  My list has been refined to the point where all the tasks on there are final tasks.   When these are done, the project is done.  At the start, the list is always, "what to do to get started."  And in my notes each day, I write down what I did, what still needs to be done and anything else that came up.  Each day the list is changing until one day, I can see the handful of tasks that it will take me to finally finishing the thing...whatever the thing is.  And that's where I am for the remix project.  Each track has a few tasks left, such as rerecording a bassline, tweaking the drum mix or just bouncing out individual audio tracks from MIDI instruments.  (Sorry just threw some music technical-ese in there, my bad).

This is how my mind works best and there are probably better ways to do it but it works for me so I stick with it.  Some might choose to not even start until every task is laid out on a very precise to do list, some might not make lists at all.  Honestly, so much goes in to my endeavors that I can't not make to do lists but on the other hand, I also can't box myself in and have to remain fluid and be able to accomplish things in stages. If I sat down and wrote out every single task that needed to be done I'd probably quail at the thought of starting.  And ultimately, when taking on a project like this (or any other of comparable scale), it's impossible to see what all needs to be done until you start doing things.  It's important to be systematic, of course, and figure out the best place to start, because that could make me quail as well, not knowing where to start.

Hehe...quail.  What a funny word.  Anyway, as you can see I'm getting a little loopy. It's time to shut this down and go to bed...as always.  Wish me luck with the lists and completing all of my tasks.  This coming Sunday night, the great Tania Stavreva is having her birthday celebration concert at Vivaldi Cafe in the W. Village and Lacy and I have been invited to play.  Though I get off work at 11pm that night, we will probably be doing so.  Stay tuned for updates on that.  Good night! 

Momentum...

I always find myself typing these things when it's late at night...I guess when I don't feel like sleeping and it's time to go to bed, I inevitably become introspective enough to write somehow.  And it seems lately that I have a lot to talk about and a general desire to report but I'm reluctant to do so because so much of it is up in the air.  As unsuperstitious as I can be, I still do believe there's such a thing as a jinx.

I guess I can talk about some of it.  A month or so ago, I was contacted by a licensing agency in New England who was interested in potentially using my music in a documentary.  I talked about it briefly in this entry.  I waited the precursory one week to return contact after I submitted my music for their client to review (it's not like dating where you wait three days), and I didn't hear anything back for a while.  That's pretty standard so I just assumed the director had decided to go in a different direction.  Which is exactly what they said when they finally did contact me last week.  However, they also said they'd still be interested in including my music in their non-exclusive licensing catalog.  This is actually a pretty good thing.  I had thought about submitting my music to one of the many sound library websites out there many times, as early as 2008 before I even moved here.  But I either never got around to it or talked myself out of it because I wasn't ready to produce anything I felt was up to the caliber of the other stuff up on those sites and I was overwhelmed at the prospect of putting my stuff out there and hoping it would stand out somehow.  Now, I'm having someone coming to me soliciting music for such a venture and it actually makes me a little proud of how far I've come. And of course, ten times more confident.   

There's still work to be done, though, and lots of it.  My latest batch of electronic beats and compositions are in various stages of completion at the moment.  I've been told to take my time looking over the contract and in the meantime, I hope to be pushing some of these through to the mastering stage and completing the others that are still half composed.  And also deciding what among my existing catalog is close enough to that stage to submit.  Oh, and also finding a good entertainment/music lawyer. 

It's all very exciting but I'm trying to keep a level head.  There's still the lawyer to hire, the contract to sign, the copyright and ASCAP registration to take care of.  There's still the waiting period between when I submit and when someone comes along and actually requests to license a track or two and then the wait until I'll get paid.  But it is nice to know that that will be a possibility now.  That right there is a musician's bread and butter, sync licensing and royalties.  Oh yeah! 

On to voice over, because I guess I can talk about that too.  I'm finally ready, or as ready as it takes to be able to just start putting myself out there.  Online auditions are wearying me and I'm ready to submit my demos to production houses and talent agencies in order to get more exposure and hopefully more auditions, perhaps even some in person ones since I do, after all, live in New York @#$%ing City.

The significance of all this to me is that I'm finally betting on myself.  In a way, though, I'm actually getting a confidence boost from the attention to my music so I'm trying to apply that new found confidence to my voice over ventures, because even though, I've only had a handful of gigs this year, I've had 8 times as many as I did last year.  Perhaps I have a reason to be confident there as well.  I certainly see an upward trend in both areas.  That's how I choose to spin it as it's not so much of a stretch to say that I'm doing exponentially better this year compared to last year.  So exciting to have momentum again. 

On that note, you guessed it, I have to go to sleep. It's almost 1:30pm and I still have some of this cider left to drink and a little more unwinding to do.  So, good night and wish me luck on everything.