Tried for three loops today. On my third loop later in the day I closed my eyes to relax for a bit and I was just gone for a minute or two. Close to dreaming, the hypnagogic stuff. Maybe I’ll do two during the day and one before bed. I think 3 during the day is pushing it for me.
Man I really overdid it. Note to self wait at least 3 to 4 hours in between loops to avoid overload. Taking today off, I can feel my mind churning through all the sub content now.
I had this fire in me this week that said I need to change now. Unfortunately I took the approach of hammering my subconscious thinking I could brute force my way through. I think moving forward I should work on an adaptive listening routine. Meaning some days 2 loops, some days 1, some days none. My energy levels fluctuate wildly depending on what’s going on in my life. I probably shouldn’t stick to a rigid routine. My main issue is determining what is genuine overload and needing rest vs reconciliation.
I’ll see how I feel today and tomorrow. If it felt like I got hit by a truck I’ll know I’ve gone too far.
As a side note I’m really liking this new track I wrote. I think I’m going to finish it up this weekend. It started coming together more when I upped my listening to 2 loops. But at the same time I couldn’t spend as much time on it because I felt tired. Still trying to figure out how to balance this because I don’t think just one loop is enough.
So I got my electronic drum kit. Pretty awesome, I have to practice but I’ve definitely been picking it up intuitively. Like simple things like how to hold the drumsticks. I now have a drum kit, keyboard, and guitar in my place. My brother came over yesterday and told me I have a studio lol. But it was cool to hear, I saw it as a reflection of my internal manifesting in the external. Maybe not super high caliber, but it’s there.
I’m trying to do things different. Often I have anxiety about going to work, doing my work, staying on top of my work,etc. I’m shifting my focus to just music, that’s all I have to think about and everything else is just supporting that. I’ve had a lot of energy unconsciously going into my dissatisfaction with this job, but I’ve realized I’ve been hyper focused on that and need to direct that elsewhere. That’s wasted energy that could be going into things that benefit me.
Three days off now and my body is finally calming down. I definitely overloaded myself. But I really understand now how much more action I have to take. My issue was always the lack of energy I felt and hammering my brain with more subliminals didn’t help.
It’s still not easy. My place is a mess. But I’ve accepted at this moment in time I can only do what I can realistically do and that’s fine. No more guilting myself because I’m not keeping on top of everything else. As long as I take action every day, no matter how small I’m improving myself.
Been finding it harder and harder to sleep during the week. Main reason being, my mind doesn’t want tomorrow to come. It’s going to come anyway whether or not I sleep. To say I’m sick of this is an understatement. This has been going on for years.
I’m going to meditate tonight instead of trying to force myself to sleep. That will at least be more productive
29 is a young age honestly. You still have a bright future ahead of you.
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Sometimes it feels like I’m running out of time. I guess it seems young, but at the same time I’ve seen how fast the years can go. I don’t want anymore of my life to feel like that.
I know I’m growing but sometimes I worry I won’t reach the vision I have for myself in my head. That’s mostly due to past experiences with trying to grow and coming up short. I know it’s different now, but it’s a hard habit to shake.
I wrote this in another thread, but fits here too:
I was totally lost in my 20’s.
In a week I will be 40.
I started getting slight success around the age 36. Now I’m getting huge results.
You have plenty of time to turn your life around. And it will come surprisingly fast once you start working on it.
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Thanks man. Needed to hear that today. This shit can haunt me daily.
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Still not finished with this track. Coming close though. Basic mixdown stuff is where I’m at now, getting it to translate well. This bugs me more than it should. But my preference is when you only hear the song and a mini sort of world in it. Hard to describe, but it’s like a virtual stage. It’s like closing your eyes and feeling like the sounds are in front of you. That’s fairly easy to do with basic recording when you have mics capturing a room sound and traditional instruments. Way harder with electronic stuff. For two reasons. One, electronic sounds are hard to contextually understand, synths are synths but you play a guitar and most people have some idea of what it is. It can be hard to be creative with synths but still maintain some physical property of it that makes it feel “real” to people. Two, emulating the depth and perception of things in a mix isn’t as simple as drowning stuff in reverb. And volume also doesn’t decreases the prominence of something in a mix.
Sometimes I envy people who can just toss stuff together without paying attention to any of this. It holds me up a lot because I haven’t developed a consistent workflow around it. I’m still learning how to put together the music beyond basic composition. The only reason I obsess on it so much is because I feel like it adds to the emotional impact of music. I don’t think most people realize it consciously, but I do believe the more clarity and physical perception of things in music the stronger the influence on the emotional state of the person. My reasoning being that humans have very evolved hearing, it’s more strongly associated with our subconscious than other senses. All sounds are waves with physical movement. We can replicate those sounds through speakers. Basically the goal is mimicking the physical movement of sounds in real life in order to influence people into believing on a subconscious level that what they are hearing is real and not a static frequency projecting through a speaker or headphone.
Having said that, I also understand good music can transcend even the crappiest of mixdowns. So it’s a balancing act. Get this stuff right and it adds to the music, but the music has to be good to begin with. And these are of course all theories based on my own experience and perception. Not everyone will share this view. But the current mixing paradigm of having stuff sound “full” by packing every nook of the song with frequency misses the point. Similarly killing all the dynamics for the sake of having shit loud is equally bad.
That’s my music rant for today. If you want a good example of guys that do this physicality of sounds right, anything by Boards of Canada. That music is much much more than just notes.
Still sticking to my what I can handle listening schedule. Working with myself not against.
Work sucked yesterday. Someone screwed something up on one of our servers. Not only was I cleaning up the fallout from it, they didn’t even acknowledge what they did was wrong. I don’t care if you make a mistake, I won’t harass you or judge you for it. But if you don’t own up to them and try to play it off like it’s no big deal or don’t even acknowledge how much trouble you caused for everyone else that really pisses me off.
I called them out on it in the most mature way possible, but their response was basically asking what we should do? Another thing I hate, when an issue comes up that’s someone else’s doing and they want to brainstorm with you but it’s really just offloading the work because they don’t want to solve it themselves. This is why I hate working in teams sometimes. It’s like high school all over again where one person does the bulk of the work in a group project and the others sit back and watch. I’m too proactive and responsible for my own good, seriously. I shouldn’t be doing everything just because I’m capable.
Latest track. Don’t know if any of what I was rambling about above came through in it or not. Seems I’m always too heavy on theory and not enough execution in most aspects of my life. Music being the big one. I can usually hear what makes songs good but for me I feel limited in what I can get across.
There’s a rigidity or hesitancy to my music. Not much variation in sounds, it’s like I get stuck when something works and don’t know how to move beyond it or I’m afraid of ruining it.
Going to stay consistent with ElixirU. I’ve said it before but I’m going to try. No bouncing around between Ultima titles. I don’t think ElixirU is really all that gentle per say, but it’s a lot less demanding than Rebirth. And limit destroyer might also be a bit much now.
Also going to get off these meds I’m on. They were ok at first. They got me through the day, but they amped me up. And now I’m just facing a lot of agitation and a serious short temper. I thought it was AM at first but looking at it now there’s no way that sub would be generating this anger and agitation in such a toxic unproductive way. Maybe I’m wrong. But my short term memory is complete crap lately as well. There’s a lot going on, so it’s hard to isolate everything. But I need a baseline to go off of.
This hasn’t been easy for me, getting on the meds. And I’m willing to keep trying other stuff, there just has to be a huge tangible benefit not “ok I’m feeling a little better”. At this point in my life I’m going to do what helps me improve my life. Can it be fixed with diet, exercise, and meditation? Maybe? Who knows. Will I actually do those things? No because I’m in a hole right now and I can barely function as is. That’s one thing that really winds me up when people who have never experienced an ounce of what I’ve dealt with and want to make some smug suggestion about diet and exercise. I get it, it’s important. I’m not eating like shit and yeah I could use more movement in my life. But it misses the point entirely. In order to do those things I have to be able to do them, which I can’t.
To more closely illustrate how much I don’t do stuff in my life. I ordered windshield wipers about 4 weeks ago. I just put them on a few days ago. They were sitting in the cardboard box, not the packaging, the shipping laying in the middle of my floor. To my brain that was huge monumental task to do, to most people that’s something you knock out on the day you got them or one day after work or in the morning before work. And then here’s me sitting down for close to 6 hours on a saturday working on music and not eating anything. You could argue putting on windshield wipers is 1000x easier than writing a song, apparently that’s not what my mind thinks. That’s my brain in a nutshell every day.
Decided I’m going to try Dragon Reborn. I don’t want to run it because I don’t want to lose sight of my goals/derail myself with healing. I’ve already wasted so much time in my life and I hate the idea of taking time to heal. I’ve done it in the past, wasted a whole year on it with minimal gains. I’m not talking subclub, but I am VERY hesitant to go that route again unless DR does it very differently.
So I’m going to put this journal on pause for the moment and try DR. If it causes too much reconciliation in my life I’ll drop it.