Music Monday – 30 Nov 20 – The Journey Continues

Greetings all. I’m back with another edition of Music Monday. This series was supposed to be weekly, however, habits only stick after consistent application of them over time – something which didn’t happen from the get on, BUT, I caught it today, so here I am. That’s said, I’m going to let the words fly as they may.

Yeah, we all have the same amount of time each day – 24 hours – so GTD always boils down to time management AND discipline (to me, motivation doesn’t count). Since the last post, I’ve been working on multiple music projects of varying kinds. One recurring one is creating instrumental backing tracks from live instrument recordings to accompany various church choirs, within the church I attend, for an overall streaming product, during service, on any given Sunday. What this also involves is creating a video product of my wife, a choir vocalist, singing against either the original music or the backing track I’ve created as stated above. This recurring project came about because our church, while streaming services over the internet, has not reassembled in public due to the pandemic. It is also an idea that came to fruition to get those vocalists and musicians to continue to participate, albeit remotely, during the pandemic. Needless to say, this is a first time activity for ALL involved, which is not without associated challenges of not only rehearsing alone and delivering vocal and musician audio/video to me for editing and assembly, but trying to solidify a process that all can follow that will result in the best product in the end. I won’t get into all the examples of said challenges here, but suffice to say, they are present.

Outside of that, I’ve been reassessing the amount if projects in various stages (including non-start) that I blogged about in the first edition of Music Monday. Some dissipated but were replaced by new, smaller ones. Nevertheless, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really need to assess where and how I’m trying to go with completing projects and, moreover, needing to assess whether I’m being to ambitious in some way or another. Why? The primary reason is I want to release more of my own projects more frequently, but balance that between getting on the road to music placement, and getting back into writing for film/TV/media, the latter two creating better opportunities for residual income over time. All three will require a systematic plan of development (SPD) and that SPD will require doing less of a bunch of other things. That “less doing” has been a constant planning exercise for the last two months, in preparing to hit the ground running in 2021. The failure of New Year resolutions (I just read a stat that about 67% of people fall off the wagon in the third week of January), is that a habit or habits are not developed ahead of time. I’m not trying to go out like that, but there are 31 days left to in 2020 before a new decade is started, so I need to focus big time to get those habits in gear. Nuff said.

As always, thanks for the read.

Oceans of rhythm….

Fresh!

Social Media Sabbatical (SMS): Day 10 – 10 Aug 18

Hello…. and the weekend is here! In a way, it’s been a long one (work wise I guess), but Friday did get here kinda quick so I guess they cancel each other out. I’m sitting in Starbucks, with a cup of ice that is displacing 14.5 oz of Teavana Craft Iced Tea – Peach Green Tea. I’m sorta working/sorta decompressing with some me time before heading home. I’m debating getting up and leaving my warm bed at 2:30am to go to work for the social event they are having to witness the launch of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spacecraft. The launch is scheduled for 3:33 am on a Delta IV rocket, courtesy of United Lauch Alliance.

Why is this launch special? It’s the first mission I worked on since returning back to the satellite/space exploration business. Though I didn’t work on it nearly as long as the other missions I’ve been working on for the last eight months, the company I work for built this spacecraft for NASA. So, that said, I may just do that. The second good part is that I get a crazy early start to my Saturday! LOL. We’ll see.

No articles to share today about the social media sabbatical. I did have a short chat with a friend who says she is thinking of cutting back a bit. I’m just gaining daily insight everyday overall. This isn’t the first time I left FB, but it is the first time leaving both FB and Instagram for this long together.

Anyway, that’s about it. If this is the first post you’re reading about the title subject, feel free to start at 1 August to catch up, if you’re so inclined.

Have a good weekend….
Fresh!

Social Media Sabbatical (SMS): Day 5 – 05 Aug 18 – Buh Bye FB phone app

Hello all…

So, for the past five days, I’ve been waxing philosophically about the results, merits, etc, of now scrolling social media. I don’t really miss FB (although I did wind of people in the Apple Watch Fitness Fans Group, of which I am one of the, and most active posting, admins) posting about me in reference to a topic. One of the membes, who convinced me to tell the group I was gonna be AWOL for August, said…”Doug’s on social media sabbatical, LOL” (what’s with the “LOL”? #eyeroll…hahah).

I decided I was going to post everyday of this journey, and I will hold fast to that. What I do see happening is once it becomes more habit and less getting used to, the posts may become shorter, but thats cool. Part of this exercise is really to see what I activities I end up substituting for the scroll time. They’ll be varied, I’m sure, but it’s certain that making time to learning this coding language, Python, will be one. So far it’s going well. I’m developing a project while doing tutorials (the best way to learn is to do). I’ve created a sub page here on my blog for that. I’ll be posting there more, as well as on my exercise and fitness sub page. As my friend-in-sabbatical, DarrenKeith said today, the absence of the scroll, has made blogging refreshing again. Definitely check out his blog – This World My Life

One thing I do know is after five days, I’m certain the FB app will not be back on my phone. Instagram, that’s a different story because it’s used for my music production and film scoring branding (at least for now). The key thing with any social app, overall, is to “control the scroll”

This is one of these short posts, it appears.

Have a great night (or day, evening, etc).

peace,
Fresh