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How I Can Help
It has occurred to me over the past few weeks and months that a lot of what I’ve been writing has been more for me than for anyone else. It’s nice to share my thoughts and goals with an audience on occasion, but I’ve really gotten away from the point of this blog in the first place. That is, to offer creative ways to solve problems and achieve goals by relaying my own experiences in those areas.
I’ve been working on a lot of things in my own life in the past 11 months since starting this blog, and while I’ve fallen flat on my face in certain areas, I’ve made a lot of positive progress in others.
Music
While there’s been a fair share of face-falling in this area, I’ve been making a lot of positive progress by focusing on singular projects and building a sound out of them, rather than splitting all of my musical ideas between a ton of different projects. I originally had six or seven albums planned under six different projects, but as it is, I’m on track to get my first album this year out sometime before the end of the year.
A lot of that has to do with switching to solely releasing music online for the first half of the year under the Philistine on the Sidewalk project, and then banishing all music projects from my life and focusing on releasing music under my own name since July of this year, using the same online format. It’s definitely freeing to create a song and put it online without worrying about projects or potential albums or what have you.
That said, I have enjoyed putting together albums over the years and I want to get back to that, so I’m going to do my best to balance the amount of time I spend on online releases (monthly songs) and albums, as well as the occasional compilations and contests that pop up. I can help people in this area by showing what has (or hasn’t) worked for me and what helps me enjoy the creation of music even more.
Then there’s the more clinical sides of music – technicality and production. I’m no virtuoso and being one hasn’t really been a goal for me, though I have an ear for atypical time signatures and have been rather successful in creating songs that employ those time signatures and making them sound rather normal. It’s not something that I’ve worked with much recently, though I’ll come back to them more with upcoming monthly songs and I can share the process of creating them and help other musicians with doing so as well. It’s a bit of a niche topic, but I know there are other folks interested in these things.
As for production, I’m definitely not the one to listen to if you want clinically clean-sounding music. I’m very fond of layering and textures in sound, which makes it difficult to have a sterile-sounding recording when there are certain textures that aren’t meant to be crystal clear. I’m also more of a DIY guy (Do-It-Yourself) and the programs I use are either freeware (MODPlug Tracker, Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch), inexpensive to register (Goldwave, Reaper), or not especially costly to buy (Reason).
I’ve been working for years to figure out a way to balance all of the ways I can use these programs to create sounds and edit royalty-free samples and the sounds that I’ve created (organically or through Reason). I feel that I’m on the cusp of passing a threshold of song creation and production, and I can help by chronicling all of the changes and tweaks I’ve made over the years to get where I am today.
Fitness
I’ve been working on my fitness pretty steadily for the past four and a half years, and in that time I’ve lost 110 pounds, spent lots of time tweaking and honing my fitness routine, increased my strength levels to higher than they’ve ever been, and have seriously reshaped my body.
In the past year alone, I’ve gone from 215 to 190, then changed up my routine to put on some more mass and now I’ve hovering around 195. In fact, I dropped from 200 to 190 after I quit going to the gym and working with personal trainers, then took even more responsibility for my personal fitness. I certainly have a lot of experience that I can relay to other people that are looking to live in a healthier fashion.
Finance
I’ve had a lot of success in this area this year through investing in the stock market and focusing on building dividends (as well as other methods of passive income). I’ve gone through lots of trial and error, and I’ve studied a lot about what makes a reliable dividend and what financial factors are warning signs for dividend cuts or are positive signs for dividend growth.
It’s been a really interesting process and I’ve learned a lot more even since writing about dividend hunting back in July. It was a lot of work to get everything in my portfolio balanced, but now I’ve been able to mostly put my portfolio on auto-pilot.
With one less area to put a lot of focus on, I can go back to focusing more on aspects of living creatively that I’m still trying to develop and new ways of doing so. I can also help in this area with more ideas on how to get people started in dividend investing and how to monitor one’s stocks to make sure that someone is getting the best value from them.
Gaming
I’ve put gaming on the back burner quite a bit this year, as the times that I’ve let it come to the forefront, my productivity has taken a serious hit. I think the best way for me to enjoy gaming and still remain productive is to schedule a few hours here and there to game, but even better still is to play through these games and clean up old reviews that I’ve done about them or write new ones. I started some work on this with Nintendo-A-GoGo earlier this year, but that fizzled out because I was stretching myself too thin with so many projects going on.
I still have plans to move all of my gaming-related content to that Gaming tab at the top of the page and I’m going to figure out new ways to play these old games (NES and SNES mostly) that can benefit other fans of the classic gaming genre, as well as expose folks to some overlooked gems that they may have never thought of playing before.
I want to do this because gaming has been a part of my life in a serious way since Christmas of 1988, when I first got my NES. I’ve played lots of different games for lots of different systems over the years and with retro-gaming becoming more and more prevalent as time passes, I have a wealth of knowledge about the topic that I want to share even more than I already have. I also have an affinity for covering songs from these games, and I will continue to do that far into the future.
Projects in Process
While the above topics are a large part of what I choose to occupy my time with, I’ve also got some other projects that are developing or are ready to be shared through this blog and this website. Obviously, this website in itself is a project that I’m embarking on and finally taking seriously after all these years, and I will continue to grow it in multiple ways to share multiple facets of my creativity with other people. I also plan to clean up the Concatenation Records site in a similar way once I’m happy with the progress I’ve made on this site.
Another facet that is tied in with this blog is my passion for writing and one of my four big goals for 2011 is to finally get back to writing short stories. I’ve thought about trying to do a novel, but that’s definitely a few years down the road after I’ve worked on my writing skills even more and will have put other facets of my life on auto-pilot.
I mentioned my four big goals for 2011 and I’ve already talked about three (recording music, building this site, writing short stories), but the fourth one could have some benefit to others as well, as it is to reduce clutter and the amount of possessions I have.
I’ve been doing well with the clutter aspect, but outside of my CD collection, I’ve yet to really start going through the things I’ve accumulated over the years to see what I don’t really use or need any more. Once I do, I can share my experiences and hopefully help other folks with finding creative ways of clearing out the excess.
How Can I Help?
I’m always open for suggestions about writing on topics pertaining to creativity that I’ve experienced, so if you have any suggestions, please express them in the forum or on Twitter or Facebook and I’ll do my best to field them and write about them.
I’d love to be able to help people develop their creativity more through writing about my own experiences in creativity!
Discuss this post at the For the Love of Creativity Forum!
Posted on November 6th, 2010.
External Links
• GoldWave Inc. – GoldWave – Audio Editor, Recorder, Converter, Restoration, & Analysis Software
• MODPlug Central – MODPlug Central | Free Music Software and Search Portal | Tracker, Player, Plugin
• Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch – Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch
• Philistine on the Sidewalk – Philistine on the Sidewalk
• Reaper – REAPER | Audio Production Without Limits
• Reason – Propellerhead Software – Products – Reason
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