You know, there’s problems inherent in doing a video every day.
Mainly, the daily video thing means I never have the chance to really polish or refine anything I do. The process becomes unnecessarily linear as I do not have the time or energy to go back and fix things past a certain low minimum.
Take today’s pharyngeal cry for help. If I was serious about singing (I am not), the sane and obvious thing to do would be to practice the song until I could do it properly and only then try to record myself singing the damn thing.
And even then, I would do a whole bunch of takes so I could string together the best bits from each and even then I might decide that none of the takes of a certain bit are good enough and rerecord those before including them.
And of course, there’s always vocal cleanup and autotune and other production tricks to make myself sound like I can sing way better than I really can.
And then, at the end, I might have something that sounds passably professional, or at least, not acutely painful. This is the well known and easily deduced “right” way to do things and not at all a mystery to me.
But for better and for definitely worse, that’s not how I do things.
In order to do things “right” in that way, I would have to spend days doing it, and for complex psychological reasons, I can only do things on a daily schedule as part of my routine, and so long term projects are not an option for me right now.
This, needless to say, is severely limiting. And that’s starting to really bug me.
I have taken one small step towards getting around that. I currently have some terrible lyrics for a song open in another tab. They’re terrible because, in a rare move by me, I was more interested in getting the important rhymes down in “rough draft” form than I was in coming up with something already good to record.
Or at least good enough for me. Le sigh.
One of these days I will take another look at the lyrics I have written and do my best to make them actually good and then feed them to Riffusion (now Producer.ai) and have it make them into a song.
But for now, I am leaving the lyrics to set while my subconscious mind beavers away at them, occasionally adding a couplet when it occurs to me.
I’m determined to do my best with this particular song for reasons which will become obvious once I actually make and release the damned thing.
So I have taken at least one step on the road to everything I make not being a sloppy first draft which has lots of talent and other good stuff in it but it’s very…. unrefined.
In the sense that mineral ores straight from the mind are unrefined.
The fact that I am completely without class, manners, or even the faintest traces of being of “good stock” goes without saying.
Considering how good I can make things when doing them in my usual halfassed one draft sloppy sideways manner, it really seems like if I could just get my shit together to work harder and longer on these things, I could make something truly amazing.
Or maybe the whole thing would fall apart the second my initial burst of enthusiasm faded and now I never want to see the thing again.
What I really need is partners who can handle the refinement for me, at least some of the time, and keep my idea from dying when I move on to the next thing.
I’m a creator. I just give birth to the damned thing.
Raising them right is someone else’s job.
More after the break.
Use your muse
And let your muse use you.
I firmly believe that great art happens when you surrender yourself to your muse. Muses need to be fed to be robust and happy and you feed them by indulging them.
And I am definitely still working on that.
I have gigawatts of mental energy and creativity and my mind is fertile farmland for regular bumper crops of all kinds of ideas, but I still don’t ever just follow my muse on impulse to see where it wants to take me and what it will do when we get there.
I get the feeling that, like with being able to buckle down and truly finish projects, following my muse would or could lead to some pretty amazing things.
But I dunno. There’s something to be said for remaining true to your basic nature and it’s entirely possible that I am just not made to be impulsive and spontaneous.
I’m made to think about stuff.
And that’s how I indulge my muse, too. My creativity flows from my having been a bored and lonely child with a lot of time spent doing nothing but thinking as I had finished my classwork in a flash and now I had to wait for everyone else to do so.
So I ended up roaming the inside of my head instead. I would rather have been reading but for some bizarre reason that was not allowed.
A pathological response to the horrors of seeing a child quietly enjoying themselves when they’re in school, I suspect.
That’s where both my creativity and my insight come from because both stem from having a mind that makes connections between things and processes what it gets in input on a very deep correlational level.
It’s always why I talk like that.
So I dunno. Maybe I should stop trying to make myself into something I am not and concentrate on being the best version of who I really am that I can.
Whatever the fuck THAT means.
Don’t ask me. I just work here.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.