For the last four years I was confused. I wasn’t really sure if I was a producer or a DJ. Now, while there is definitely some overlap and many excellent artists have successfully done both, I felt like I was spending my time with one foot in both areas and not making a ton of progress in either. It was also getting expensive and I felt my workflow was getting more and more unwieldy. All that’s changed now. Interestingly enough, I have the fact that my mass storage disk exploded a while back and an unnecessary, costly purchase to thank for it.

You see, after I lost damn near everything I had to sit down and think about how I would recover. Being the engineer type I considered it an exercise in requirements gathering. What did I lose that was essential? How quickly did I want to have certain capabilities back? What would my new information architecture look like? I actually sketched all this out on a notepad that I kept updating and tweaking over the course of a couple days. (I should note that a home server with a RAID-5 array was part of the solution.)

Also right around the time my disk self-destructed I had my Pacemaker arrive. With serial number five (yep, #0005) you can probably tell I was pretty interested in this thing. And I certainly was. Ironically this post started out before my disk crashed as a post about what a fantastically cool device it was. I mean, sure it was $750 bucks, but still, pretty cool. There was definitely a learning curve involved with this device and it takes a fair bit of skill but I was confident that with some time I’d have it down.

But while I was spec’ing out my “brave new world” of computing something happened. I realized that DJing itself wasn’t really what I liked. What I liked was live performance with sampling. At that moment everything kind of snapped into place and I realized the reason I was constantly fighting with the ideas behind what “DJing” meant to me was I actually wasn’t trying to really DJ in the true sense of it and in fact didn’t want to DJ. I wanted to produce! It might sound funny or odd that it took me this long to realize that simple fact, but there you have it.

I still want to perform live in the future, it would just be a different kind of show. Truth be told, one of the great things about using Ableton Live as your main DAW is that you can perform out in a way that’s strikingly similar to how you produce in the studio. That’s one of the things I love about it and I definitely want to try and keep my workflow as loose and creative as possible to encourage that mindset.

So as I rebuilt my main audio workstation I kept all this in mind and streamlined my processes and even my gear setup. I returned the Pacemaker (somewhat sadly I must admit) and decided that the money I would have spent on it would be better suited to saving up for a new keyboard or possibly a guitar. I have to say now that I’ve done all this I am feeling less burdened and more creative. It’s funny how a change in mindset can affect so much.

I’ll have something cool for people to listen to here by the end of the weekend hopefully!

Lately I find myself drawn more and more to music. Listening, production, the gear, the culture. And not just the electronica, but all sorts. For example, I really want to get back into jazz. (What I wouldn’t give for a nice tenor sax right now.)

But this stupid subwoofer issue is really irritating. If I don’t get this fixed soon (M-Audio is still slacking on sending the schematics) I’m probably just going to have to go out and buy a different sub. I know it’s stupid to let this bother me that much, but for whatever reason it does. I guess I just got really used to having that supportive low end in my music. And I’m a perfectionist when it comes to my craft and that means having my setup as perfect as possible too.

Soon though it will be taken care of and I can go back to making aural magic. Some days I feel like I’m near to some kind of breakthrough and that I will really be able to make all the pieces in my setup work in unison. It just takes time and effort though more than anything else.

Effort I don’t mind one bit. Time is another story unfortunately. Work is so out of control at the moment that what free time I have usually has to go to the other necessities of life. I’m lucky if I get 4 hours a week to work on music and that really doesn’t cut it.