Starting fresh
Lately, I’ve been trying to consolidate my work.
I have Notion blogs, gifs in Notion of video game demos, Substack posts, Soundcloud audio files, itch.io demos, voice memos, videos of playing piano, tapes with music on them…
I’ve been trying to make a centralized space for all of this to live. The question was: where?
To consolidate my music, I decided that it would be easiest if I reduced the “data” of the music I create into a single format that easily captures 80% of the idea. I could add metadata like the key it’s in, notes that make up the melody, or how I constructed a sound. I could maintain the Logic or Ableton project that the idea is contained in, so I’ll have MIDI to reference. I could take a video so I can see what notes I’m playing on the keyboard when I’m recording acoustic stuff.
That makes it much harder to quickly consume those ideas though, when the time comes to flip back through my ideas and reflect.
Condensing any idea into a single wav file with no extra metadata, in a single folder, makes it much easier to keep track of ideas. Naming every idea also allows me to track different versions of the same thing, and start to remember the “character” of each track. I’ve found myself neglecting ideas because I don’t know how to refer back to them in my brain. If I name everything, even just off the cuff, that gives me a link that’s sticky in my mind.
Same with written ideas. I like Notion, but I don’t want to maintain it for public-facing portfolio work. Stripping down the content into its barest form gives me more ability to access it more easily anywhere.
If I embed an audio link in my blog posts, then I can easily listen to the idea on my phone by just accessing my website. No need for complex file-syncing across devices.
This is the most recent post on this blog (for now), but it’s the first in this new home. I’m adding in some writings from other places. Those will all be older than this post, but this is where the blog begins!