The EP has been done for three weeks and now I'm deep into the process of getting it out into the world. Which is a lot like constructing a building, in that 80% of the timeline is spent just getting the foundation right, and then the rest happens swiftly. Got some publicity photos done this weekend and am working on the press kit -- the story of me, and the story of the thing. All that stuff. Picking a distributor and a publisher. Beginning the long slog of trying to get people to write about it or just post tracks on their playlists. Thinking of releasing my first pandemic track, totally unrelated, in the next couple weeks just to help juice the social media machines for the Big Release in July. I was listening to the final master this evening and I can legitimately say I'm proud of it. That's no small thing.
My current project is learning to work with analog synthesizers, my vehicle being the Minibrute 2S. Since April 1st I have put in about 30 hours of work and practice, and this morning I finally came up with some interesting sounds and sequences in a 13-minute jam that I recorded. This project is actually going faster than I anticipated, although I'm only halfway through the manual at this point, and have just barely begun to get into what is possible with it. The device has three parts: a synthesizer, a sequencer, and a patch bay which allows you to totally rewire both of the others. I'd estimate my mastery of the synth, with the default wiring, at about 40%. The sequencer part has a depth of functionality that I'm only just beginning to grasp, so I'm at maybe 25% with that. And I've barely touched the patch bay, just the most basic, most obvious patches so far -- LFO stuff and what they call a 'hard sync' patch which everyone needs to know early on. So, 2%? That's an average of 22%, which feels about right. Catch me after about a hundred more hours.
I grew about a million chives, parsley plants, and thyme from seed in the past month, another thing I never thought I'd do before Covid. It's interesting to me that of all these vigorous sprouts, only a handful of them are going to be the plants I'll live with all year and eat off of. Agriculture in action, on my balcony.
Python is still proceeding as an interesting hobby. I'm at the point where I can finally see the actually interesting stuff cresting on the horizon. I have a solid grasp of the basic data structures, and lately I've been learning to create and use functions to access, change, store, and display that data. Next up in the course are something called classes, and how to use external files, which I expect will be at the heart of what I will do with Python. My first idea back when was to generate waveforms from data sets with a periodic aspect (like weather data) and then use the results in one of the wavetable synths I have. That seems clearly possible. My knowledge is just so basic that I simply can't imagine the limits.
One-third vaccinated. I'm ten days post dose one, and will be offering in-person instruction again starting 6/1. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.