Reading Notes

7-9 Minute Read | Laptop or Tablet Recommended

Topics and Themes

Balancing flexibility and structure in work; Time management in the creative realm; Designing a life with both creativity and engagement with the world.

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I originally wanted to teach guitar for a silly reason: I wanted to have a job in-between touring stadiums. I know... reach for the stars, right?

In my mind, I didn't want to be out of a job during the months I wasn't rocking the free world. Thankfully, after my dream of being a rock star died, I learned that teaching offered me a chance to dig into my own happiness in a much deeper way. That, and it made my life a whole lot more fun.

For starters, teaching privately meant that I could teach anytime of the day. When I first began building my teaching practice, I was strict with having a 9-5 schedule. I soon wised up that I could restructure my hours to avoid rush-hour traffic (totally amazing in a city like Austin).

About two years into teaching, my Dad mentioned that if I charged more, I could work fewer hours and the clients would get better. I honestly thought he was full of shit at first. Have you ever heard saying “The older you get, the smarter your father gets?” Of course, Dad was right. I charged more, I worked fewer hours, and the students got way more dedicated. With these changes, I felt like I was getting away with murder in my work-life.

The importance of scheduling out creative time

I had an epiphany after I made a greater number of adjustments like these to my work life: If I can structure my teaching schedule so elegantly, how do I wish to structure my off-hours? How do I wish to structure my time away from teaching to be the most creatively fulfilling? Of course I wanted to create new music, but I found myself stymied by the luxury of having too much unstructure time. It's like Twyla Tharp says in her book The Creative Habit: If you want to ruin creativity, throw as many resources at it as possible.

At that time, I had another massive luxury of a separate office where I taught and recorded music. I wanted work to be totally seperate from my home life. The trouble was that all of my recording equipment was at the office. If I wanted to create music, I had to drive there. Going to that office to "be creative" didn't quite work for me.

I silently chastised myself about this for years. Then, the pandemic happened. Yeah... the separate office had to go. There was no was I was going to pay two rents during one of the worst economic periods of my adult life. I moved all my teaching and recording equipment to a spare room in my house. I had to make it work, somehow.

After some tweaking of the acoustics and adjusting to the idea that students will come to my home, my office began to feel super comfortable. But even after I settled into the new situation, I still felt like I wasn't structuring my creative time as best as I could. I had this annoying suspicion that I could have finished off a bunch of old projects earlier if I were a bit more ruthless with my schedule. After reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, I knew I finally had the answer.

Cal Newport teaches at Georgetown University and is a well-known author who has long offered excellent advice on creative productivity (in other words, how to get our most interesting work done without giving up on our responsibilities in the world). He has long advocated for doing what is most effective in one's life to reach the goals we dream of reaching. In Deep Work, he presents a very compelling case to schedule uninterrupted time to focus on the things most important to us. In his view, the idea of deep work comes to life when we schedule out the time to work, engage, struggle with, and solve hard problems that we want to solve, and without any interruptions.

The AM/PM Creative Routine

Reading Newport's Deep Work inspired me to structure my time outside of teaching. And what came out of it? I call it the AM/PM creative routine. Here it is:

The AM part of the equation is this: I wake up at 5:30 AM. The silence in my neighborhood encourages me to be super creative. I quiet my phone. I refuse to check email. I practice music. I work on finishing albums. I focus on creative projects that I intend to finish.

Once 12 PM hits, I shift. I begin to see the world beyond my head, engage with the people in it, and be completely present in my interactions. I shift to the PM part of my day. That’s why I teach in the afternoons and evenings. I ended up choosing Sundays through Wednesdays, from 2 PM to about 8PM to teach. During this time, I am totally present to the outside world.

In short, the AM/PM creative routine (for me) looks like this: 5:30 AM to 12PM: Create excessively. 2PM to 8PM get my extrovert on. It works for me.

Making your own version of the AM/PM Creative Routine

If you've made it this far in this article, then congrats! Here's where this'll get really applicable, for you. Let's go over how you can make your own version of an AM/PM creative routine. First, you need to ask yourself one simple question:

When am I most creative?

Why start with the creativity, rather than the work-life? I’m assuming you don’t want to have a job forever, right?!? It’s my strong belief that we need to give priority to our most creative moments on our schedules.

If you know when you are most creative, put that time on your calendar. Schedule it out. Block it off. Do not let anything get scheduled during that creative time. It's not time to check email or get engaged with sending messages. It's sure as hell not time to answer to a boss's silly needs. That's your scheduled time to just create. Guard it with your life.

Once you've given that creative time the priority it deserves and scheduled in on your calendar, the next step is to schedule your work-life around it.

If you're annoyed with that last sentence I wrote, I don't blame you. Everyone's situation is different. I recognize that. Keep in mind that that no work situation is final. You are not stuck forever, in exactly the same circumstance and exactly the same job. Chances are good you have far more flexibility to schedule around your creative times than you think you do.

A close friend of mine, an unbelievably creative man, works in the IT department of a major university. He was taken aback by how easy it was to get his employers to accept his proposal to work from home. Now, without a daily two-hour commute, he has far more room to schedule out his many creative pursuits. He has more balance. You probably have more flexibility than you think you do with the "PM" part of the equation. Just tease it out. The solution will come.

Wrapping Up…

There are times for myopic creative exploration. These times need to be spoken for on our schedule and deeply protected. Similarly, there are times for engagement with the forces of the world... times for extroversion and presence with our families, friends, and professional colleagues. That also needs a little bit of structure, too.

I need a well-maintained balance between both mindsets to get to where I'm going (aka, the toppermost of the poppermost, as John Lennon mentioned before the Beatles got to be huge). Clearly, it's my strong belief that the introverted creative exploration and the external engagement with the world need balance for me to have any chance of happiness and success. It’s what I value.

If you value that balance too, then be sure to schedule time to create as well as when to engage with the outside world.

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Reading Notes

3-5 Minute Read | Laptop or Tablet Recommended

Topics and Themes

Netflix's pivot to streaming; Most options are trashy; Find the best option and throw the rest out.

Reed Hastings, former head of Netflix, is living proof that only a few things really matter. The story of how Hastings built Netflix into a behemoth is partly a story of how he had numerous options presented to him, but ended up selecting the best possible path for the company. Everyone who loves to create art or music can gain valuable insights from understanding how Netflix became a household name.

How Netflix Crushed It

In the early 2000s, Netflix pretty much obliterated the movie rental market with its strategy to send DVD rentals to customers while waiving late fees. It probably put Blockbuster out of business.

Netflix was prospering. There was no reason to rock the boat. Reed Hastings, however, recognized the potential of the internet to wipe out the business model of renting physical DVDs when people wanted to watch movies at home.

He had a choice. He could maintain the existing business model based on DVD rentals, despite the drawbacks of sending physical items to customers who might not return them. Or, he could gradually leverage the expanding technology of the internet to deliver movies directly to people’s homes, instantly, with no extra effort required to return the DVD.

In other words, he could have chosen the many options that would bolster, defend, and protect Netflix's already successful DVD rental business, or he could slowly invest in a single option that had the potential to rewrite the script on how customers watched movies at home.

We all know the end to this story. Netflix is, well, Netflix. And there’s much we can learn from it as artists by analyzing it. To me, Netflix's pivot serves as an ideal example of how to filter through the thousands of bad options to get to the one option that truly crushes it.

Most Options Are Trashy

Options appear and disappear, freely, easily, and constantly. There’s no shortage of options! And to be super clear: Most of the options we have to choose from are not worth it. Very few of them have any significance at all.

Think of all the social media posts you scrolled through recently (ahem!). Which ones stand out in your mind? How many of them do you remember? I'd be surprised if you remember more than one or two posts (ahem, again!).

You had options. There's no shortage of social media posts. But if you can’t remember much about most of them, were they good options to invest your time in? Maybe doom-scrolling doesn't actually do a whole lot for us after all...

And that’s the thing: Most options are not worthy of your time.

Finding the Best Option Takes Time, Effort, and Courage

Reed Hastings invested time to uncover the internet’s potential for streaming. He invested resources into analytics and monitored the changing landscape of consumer behavior. He observed how technology improved enough to handle streaming. He moved forward because he saw the best possible route to grow Netflix. That kind of decision-making requires time, effort, and a boatload of courage.

But, just because making choices requires so much effort does not excuse us from taking every single option presented to us at face value. Let's not make a friend out of laziness.

As we create, be it music or art or film or whatever, we will encounter thousands of options. They will get delivered to us, constantly, whether we like it or not. Should we use this color? Should we use that chord progression? Should we shape the character’s arc in more ways?

Choosing gets easier when we remember that most of the options don't have any value. Only a few options truly matter. John Maxwell rightfully said: You can not overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.

Perhaps we, as artists, ought to save ourselves for the one extraordinary option that outshines all the others and lean into it. Perhaps we could do better to accept the tradeoffs of cutting away the insignificant in favor of the one brilliant and shining idea.

Reed Hastings certainly had plenty of insignificant options in front of him. He could have bolstered and propped up Netflix’s DVD rental business with all his resources. And yet? He chose the best option after quite a lot of deliberation and gradually invested in it. He made that decision thoughtfully, and now we all know Netflix.

In our work as creatives, let’s do the same. Let’s carefully discard as many trivial (or trashy or insignificant or stupid) options as possible. Let’s instead invest in the best options only, from here on out.

Let's do the art that we really want to do.

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This post was inspired and influenced by Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I totally recommend it.

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Reading Notes

9 Minute Read | Laptop or Tablet Recommended

Topics and Themes

Creating with just the basic tools; The right tool at the right time boosts output; the DFX Transverb and examples of it's starry nature; Creativity thrives with or without great tools

In the opening scene of It Might Get Loud, Jack White casually pounds two nails into two sides of a 2x4. Just a regular block of wood, about a foot long. He winds a guitar string between the nails and secures a pickup beneath the string. He connects the pickup to an amplifier, switches on a distortion pedal, and the audience is instantly met with a burst of loud guitar squeals. He grabs a guitar slide and plays a few notes. It’s absolute rock and roll, and it sounds awesome.

Then, he turns off the distortion pedal and says, “Who says you need to buy a guitar?”

Sometimes the creative impulse is far too strong to wait for the money to magically appear to buy a half-way decent tool to create with. Sometimes, you’ve got to take what you have and make it work. Sometimes, creativity needs to happen right the F now. Jack White's approach is completely valid; we don’t need the best possible tools around us to create something meaningful.

But man, oh man, I love those times when I get my hands on a tool that completely amplifies musical output. I had this experience for the first time in 8th grade when I was on a dangerous path to breaking my Dad's beloved stereo.

An Epic Journey Through the World of 4-Track Cassette Recorders

In junior high, I often found myself recording and re-recording my terrible guitar ideas on my Dad’s high-end cassette tape deck, imagining I was in a professional studio. I'm more than a bit certain that my Dad got annoyed with me for tinkering with his equipment, so, being the wise man that he was, he redirected my focus by getting me a Fostex XR-3 cassette recorder. It’s a good thing he did. I ended up using, abusing, and breaking that thing instead of his prized tape machine!

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Fostex XR-3

The XR-3 was a 4-track cassette recorder made by Fostex in the '90s. With its four tracks, the XR-3 allowed me to record multiple layers on a single blank cassette tape. This empowered a hyper-focus on recorded sound. I plugged my guitar directly into the input, and if I liked the result, I would double it or add another part. I picked up an SM-58 microphone at a garage sale and immediately began miking my amps. I recorded everything from white noise to thunderstorms, always on the lookout for interesting sounds. I would even take the dialogue from movies and splice it into my songs. Clearly, I had no sense of what the words "Intellectual Property" meant.

Obviously, my creative output exploded. I recorded hours upon hours of music. I still have the tapes tucked away in my studio closet. Just the thought of listening to them sends shivers down my spine. The XR-3 marked the first of many experiences where the right tool arrived at just the right time.

Discovering Ableton Live

In 2005, I had another moment: I was wise enough to purchase Ableton Live during its early development. Ableton Live is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), an audio recording program that runs on a computer. It opened up a world of possibilities for me. With it, I could record entire songs and visualize the tracks on my computer. I could easily compare sounds side by side, mix songs, and export them as MP3 files. I could share my music with anyone who had an email address and the misfortune to know me personally.

Again, I saw a massive bump in creative productivity.

The Magic of Audio Plugins

Not all of the moments where I found a new tool required payment. Some of these moments where I found a creativity-bingeworthy tool were serendipitous because I just didn’t have the money to shell out for a cool new toy. One of these moments was when I found a particular audio plugin I became really passionate about.

Before we get there, audio plugins are worth a definition.

What is an Audio Plugin?

An audio plugin is a piece of software that integrates with a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) like Ableton Live. Audio plugins enhance the recorded tracks by adding various effects to the sound. These effects can range from reverb and delay to compression and EQ, as well as more unusual and esoteric effects. Today, anyone can download millions of audio plugins and plug them directly into just about any DAW.

One such plugin that had that perfect timing I've been talking about is the DFX Transverb. It was so well-received in my creative workflow in 2008 that as soon as I loaded it into Ableton Live, I knew I wouldn’t be leaving my computer for quite some time.

DFX Transverb

Stepping into the World of DFX Transverb

The DFX Transverb audio plugin was created by Sophia Poirier and Tom Murphy 7, and it’s describe by Tom 7 as…

a delay effect, but it can play back the delay buffer at different speeds. Think of it like a tape loop with two independently-moving read heads. There are lots of parameters to control and a parameter randomizer for the impatient.

If that means nothing to you, that’s okay. Think of it this way: The Transverb allows me to add the feeling of starlight to a song.

The Starlight Effect, With Examples

The Transverb gives everything I throw at it a twinkly quality, like I’m looking up at the stars on a perfectly clear night and every single star seems closer than usual. I have used this plugin on nearly every ambient release I’ve ever done. I love how it allows me to create a glistening shimmer effect without sounding like the stereotypical shimmer reverb.

For Natural Rhythm by Wicked Cities From A Distance, I frequently routed sounds from the Eurorack synthesizers to the Transverb. In this instance, my focus was on using the Transverb to make it feel as though the music were created while I was staring at the sky in the middle of a glacier. The plugin added an incredibly subtle sparkle to the song that it needed:

Another example comes from a different project called The Double Headed Seagulls. In the fourth song of Slimline, titled Skilligalee Chorus, you can distinctly hear reversed guitar sounds. If you listen closely, you’ll notice the Transverb crafting that “starlight” ambiance that I adore, up above:

My friend Jorge Martinez and I utilized the Transverb to great effect on Underwater Sunrise, a track from the album Alluvion. The song features a sequence of notes, repeated throughout. The plugin gave those notes an outwardly glistening yet intensely eerie quality. I thought it felt like climbing a mountain and looking down in a moment of sheer madness:

The Joy of Exploring New Tools in Music

As tools for digital music creation become more powerful, it behooves us to explore a little. I often don’t realize what I’m missing until I discover it. Each time I venture into exploring new tools, I find myself pleasantly surprised. Sometimes, the perfect tool appears just when I need it, and I can't stop making more music.

I want to be super clear: Jack White is 100% right. You don’t need to buy a guitar to make some noise and play rock and roll.

In my case, I don’t need to rely on the Transverb, Ableton Live, or even the Eurorack synthesizers to create music. I could grab a pot and a pan and make music by banging them together. I could sing loudly and to my heart's content, regardless of what my neighbors think. I could even write music with just a pencil and feel as happy as a clam.

However, it’s wonderful to have tools that genuinely amplify creativity, make time fly, and delight us with the results.

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