A busy day!

Super-productive today. As with a lot of my days recently, I’ve been largely focused on self-promotion stuff rather than strict creativity per se, but it does exercise my creative brain in that I have to think up new ways to do things.

The last few days I’ve been working on getting a proper mailing list established for caitlinrowley.com using MailChimp. I have to say, that I am absolutely delighted with MailChimp. Great-looking product, easy to use, very generous with their free account (2000 subscribers! 12,000 emails a month!) and the whole thing seems to be completely customisable, assuming you’re willing to put in a bit of coding work. I had some difficulties and emailed their tech support without much hope of anything coming of it (because tech supports in general are pretty useless for anything other than pre-scripted issues) and WOW WOW WOW! Not only did I get a reply within 2 hours, but the guy had actually read my email (SO rare) and had multiple solutions for me, even though it’s not an off-the-shelf problem. SO impressed. And when you set up a campaign they give you a PDF download to make your own papercraft chimp. Now that’s got to be a winner.

Anyway, so the list is set up now. Today I also posted a new blog post and have linked via the signup form to the score of the piece – it’s a temporary measure because getting it working properly is going to take a little time, but it’s better than the SoundCloud option I’ve been trying out which turned out to just be incredibly clunky and uncomfortable (and some regular internet users said they couldn’t even see the link to download. Fail).

So super-excited about all that. Hoping I should get some subscribers soon. It’ll be interesting to see if and how well it works…

Oh, and the on-again-off-again film project is on again. Got a call on Monday about that one. And I went to see a potential client about a website project yesterday… and came away with another film score project (and a website one) – woot!

Tagged with: blogging, code, completion, composition, dayjob, experimenting, learning, music, programming, publishing, self-promotion, tools, web | Add a comment

Feeling social

For quite some time now I’ve been gradually resigning myself to the thought that it might be sensible to add Facebook Like and Twitter ReTweet buttons to caitlinrowley.com – at least to the blog posts. From the feedback I get, quite a lot of people enjoy my posts, but not very many people are commenting on them, so it seems sensible – or at least an interesting experiment – to give them a mechanism whereby they can lodge their appreciation and easily share the article which hopefully might encourage some more people to start reading it too. So this evening, I’ve installed a WordPress plugin to do just that. I’m not 100% happy with this particular plugin, but it looks like it should do the job and it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I’m considering this as a first step and if it proves popular then I’ll reconsider the option of maybe building my own from scratch, which hopefully might do away with Facebook’s hideous iframe code (tables! ewww!)

It’s been a productive sort of a day, really. Apart from that I’ve also set up – finally! – score downloads on BandCamp, like I’ve been saying I’ll do for at least the last 6 months. There’s only Diabolus up there now, but it’s looking pretty good, I think. My only real reservation – and has been all the way along – is that BandCamp is so heavily geared towards downloading recordings that it’s not instantly obvious that this is a different way of doing a score download. You have to download the ‘album’ to get the score, which is actually a package containing the PDF score and an audio file of the MIDI rendition to give you an idea of what it sounds like. So I’m not entirely convinced it’ll take off, even though I hope it will – it’s just that I can’t think of a better way to do it. None of the existing score repositories seem to have much character or much community, whereas BandCamp has both. I guess if it doesn’t work then I’ll have to look at creating my own system, which I really really really don’t want to do. I mean, it’d be good to work with databases properly at last, but it’d be a lot of work, and if I then wanted to charge for something, then that’s a whole can of worms I really don’t want to face. Anyway, I’ve posted the link on Facebook and asked some people for their feedback on it – whether they like it or think it’ll be confusing. I shall cross fingers that somebody responds. Apparently 5 people have looked at it so far, but I’ve had no comments or actual downloads. Eek. If you want to take a peek, it’s at caitlinrowley.bandcamp.com.

And last, but most definitely not least, because it’s probably the most obviously creative thing I’ve done today, is that I’ve finally embarked upon the follow-up post to the one I wrote back in February about Diabolus, my solo violin piece. It’s far too long at the moment, so I need to do some serious editing before sleep, but it’s great to finally be really thinking about what I’ve learnt through to process. And also to see (although I’ve not really written about this) what lessons I’ve then applied in the piece I’m currently working on. It just feels fantastic to see some real continuity through these pieces – from what I learned in Durham to Diabolus to the orchestral piece. Just grand. I feel like I’m finally making some progress!

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Odd creativity

I spent most of this morning manically studying for my Life in the UK test (Friday morning – it loometh!) which in itself is not in the least bit creative. Quite the opposite, in fact, as it’s all kind of rote-learning stuff. Except that I’m absolute rubbish at rote learning and always have been. I still don’t know my times tables – have to add up smaller multiples in my head. So instead I’ve been forced to be super creative in how I look at the tedious statistics and dates and come up with things like:

7 out of 10 people who say they have a religion are Christian (in the UK, obv): If I take 7 away from 10, I get 3, which is of course the Holy Trinity

646 constituencies: All politicians are liars. Lying is bad. 666 is the number of the beast but there have to be a couple of politicians who at least are trying, so I’ll take a couple off the middle of the pack.

Insane, eh? But somehow it seems to be working, to some extent at least. I think the process of inventing the mnemonic is making it stick as much as the mnemonic itself. Certainly in the case of the constituencies… I’d have been stuffed if I thought politicians actually had our best interests at heart!

So that saw me through most of the day, including all the way to Euston and back, seeing Djelibeybi off again – this time to Manchester. He’s home tomorrow, but it was nice to get out and see something of the world, even if it was just an assortment of grotty tube stations.

This evening has been a riot of learning. I started out doing some listening when I got in (Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa and Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica) because I suddenly realised that I’ve got another composition lesson in 2 days’ time and I haven’t done any work at all – got a bit too comfy with the whole 3-weeks-between-lessons schedule and now need to pull myself together. Tabula rasa provided some rather nice minor revelations, especially structurally – hoping to pick up the score for that before Composer Workshop tomorrow, but the RVW left me a little unsettled. I’ve always liked that piece, but I guess I never really listened closely to it before and structurally it leaves me feeling rather adrift. Possibly the recording I was listening to, possibly seeing the score might make some sense of it, but at any rate, stuff was learned, I think.

Then after that I had booked myself in to sit in on a couple of live sessions from the Authority Rules conference I’ve signed up for. Djeli and I have a bit project going with a friend of ours that is going to require some proper promotion in a few months’ time so this conference on content marketing turned up at pretty much just the right time. The first of today’s sessions was on online lead generation and it was pretty interesting – some stuff I already knew, but also some I needed to be reminded of, some new takes on old concepts and so on. It was a good session and well worthwhile. But it was totally blown out of the water by the second session, which was on Search Engine Optimisation. Now, I do know a bit about SEO – I kind of have to because of my dayjob. I know quite a bit about how Google assesses the content in a page to determine if it’s a good fit for a given search query and I try to apply what I know in my sites (not so much in this one – mostly because I’m lazy, but also because I have more important and generally useful sites, I think, to focus on). What I hadn’t really considered in much detail at all though was the idea of SEO strategy, of developing content and working various channels to get stuff out there and actually circulating, as a way of building audience. That’s a very simplistic way of putting it, but safe to say, it was a bit of a revelation to me, the detail it went into and I have come away with all sorts of ideas and plans from both sessions. And a very tired brain that felt like Swiss cheese.

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Daylight

Today was the first day in weeks and weeks that I haven’t felt like I’ve been stuck at the bottom of a dark, dank well. The sun came out, after an horrendous day with the back yesterday today revealed a marked improvement, and I just felt more alert and healthier than I have in ages. Not sure if that’s a factor of the improved back, the sunshine, the fact that yesterday I embarked upon a new plan to delete cow-products from my diet, or just that I slept better than I have in ages (which could have been some of these combined), but it felt like at last I could see a little bit of daylight. It didn’t last the whole day and I felt entirely unequal to doing anything useful at all, but it’s a start.

Had another osteopath appointment this afternoon. I’m taking it as a good sign that I left his office in more pain than I went in. And that after a relatively mild (but still agonising) session. I’m hopeful that next week’s might be the last. Not sure whether it’ll be soon enough though to give me the all-clear to travel to Australia for my mother’s eye operation on 31 May, but we’ll see.

Nothing musical at all happened today. But I am about to listen to some Satie to redress the balance. Otherwise, did some knitting, listened to a webcast recording on content marketing, read some of Unstuck which continues interesting, although this chapter (on finding guides) I’m finding not quite so interesting as the previous chapter on nutrition and intolerances. I also read a bit more of Made to Stick which is also excellent. I’ve slowed down with this one recently, but very much still enjoying it and feel (or at least hope!) that my writing may be the better for reading it. At any rate, it makes me more aware of what’s going on in other people’s writing which is very interesting indeed!

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Yes, really

Well, I thought I was coming out of the cloud last time, but well, not so much. For a while there was getting a bit more done – and especially getting a bunch of listening done, but as time went on and the teeth were still problematic and the back seemed to actually get a bit worse, the cumulus descended and I got a bit lost. Feeling like I’m on the up just a little now though (or should that be down – the cloud goes up. Hum. Think my metaphor’s a bit mixed here!) and starting to be able to think properly. Last week my dentist put in the proper filling and said that the mini-crown is optional because the tooth still has its structural integrity (thank you, o marvellous Italian-South African root canal specialist!) and that if I want it we’ll look at doing it in 6 months. I think I probably will do it – it will provide more solidity and protection – but we’ll do the x-rays then to see if the root canal’s worked to clear the infection fully and then see what else should be done. And then about 2 days after that, the back started improving again. Can you say “psychosymptomatic”? My bite’s still a bit out, and bending down’s still pretty painful, but it feels good to at least have the start of some closure on the whole hideous episode.

So I’ve not been doing much lately. I have started a new knitting project to teach myself short-row bust darts, which is coming along well – the first actual garment (as opposed to accessories) I’ve knitted since I was about 13! Feels like a big step. I’m pleased with it so far but trying to maintain an experimental approach and accept that things may go wrong (I may have picked the wrong size – it’s hard to tell when you’re as big in front as I am what size you should be making to fit across the bust as well as on the shoulders – or the short-rows may go horribly wrong) and the whole thing may need to be unravelled, but for now it’s a nice gentle knit which is coming along well and is helping to restore some calm to my frazzled brain.

I’ve also been studying for the Life in the UK test which we’re taking next Friday. Gosh it’s dull. And I am absolutely no good at remembering either statistics or random dates or numbers (and why does it even matter that I should know how many constituencies there are??). Anyway, just going to revise and cram and do practice tests now ad nauseum for the next week.

Today I made crumpets.

And the great news is that this time they’ve actually come out properly crumpetty. Unlike the last two times when they lacked holes and ended up heavy and a bit blech. These are light and tasty. And the butter pools correctly. They have the Djelibeybi seal of approval. I also made them in the shape of space shuttles and Gromit.

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Coming out of the cloud

I feel like I’m coming out of a cloud a bit. Back’s still messed up and with the osteopath having told me I can’t go to Scotland for Easter, sounds like it’s still got a little way to go. But I’m gradually starting to get things done again and that feels pretty good. I’ve been getting a lot of listening done. Today a friend on Twitter recommended a couple of albums that were a little outside my usual comfort zone – Mono/Poly ‘Manifestations’ and Grouper’s ‘A I A’ – both of which I very much enjoyed.

I also tweaked and posted a blog post on caitlinrowley.com, The wrong teacher, or just the wrong time?. I’m glad I wrote this post. Not only does it seem to be getting a rapid and enthusiastic response, but I think it’s been important for me to realise just how far I’ve come since my first year studying composition, and to acknowledge that I was at fault at least in some measure. I doubt I could have known that back then – I was timid and ignorant and there was no internet to ask questions of even if I’d thought to do so – but I think it’s good to reconsider the situation and what I could have done to improve it. And maybe it’ll be helpful for other new students who feel they’re not doing so well as they hoped they would.

And finally I finished the iPad case! OK, not 100% – I still need to make a loop to hold the stylus securely, but the case itself is finished and ready to travel. YAY! SO glad to be done with the handsewing. Never again…

This isn’t the finished case (still need to take proper photos of it) but it shows pretty much how it’s ended up. I’m rather pleased with it

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Reconsidering

Well, this month really isn’t getting any better. And today definitely contributed to the downhill slide into dismal oblivion with the news that my very first composition teacher, Eric Gross, has died. Prof Gross was really a lovely man and a very fine composer, although I didn’t really get either of these things when I first started learning with him and for a long time I thought that he was just the wrong teacher for me.

But today I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that experience and I suspect that a large part of the blame lies with me. If I had been less timid and a bit more confident in my own abilities, if I had asked more questions in particular, what might that first year have been like? At the time I thought his music was terribly modern inaccessible. Now, after 20 years’ worth of listening and studying and writing and thinking, I find this is most definitely not the case and I wonder what I could have learned from him were he my teacher now instead of then.

So I’ve written a blog post about it which will go up on caitlinrowley.com tomorrow afternoon.

Rest in peace, Eric. I’m looking forward to exploring your music properly and learning as much as I can from it that I wasn’t ready to learn from you 20 years ago.

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Erratic

So I know I need to pull myself together, but somehow it’s not happening. And I suspect things will stay kind of erratic for the next few weeks still – back pain + intense dentistry does not for regular happy blogging make. But rest assured I’m still doing stuff. Just being kind to myself and taking a break. The past week’s activities have included a bunch of listening (including Bax’s Symphony No. 3 and the BBC’s Hear and Now broadcast of the Unsuk Chin Total Immersion concert), knitting and sewing (I’m making a case for the new iPad and then diverged and made a cowl out of the leftover yarn) and yesterday I went to the Trinity Laban Open Day to find out about Masters degrees, which was inspiring and frustrating probably in equal measure (as well as painful – I don’t recommend trekking across London with a messed-up lower back. And probably especially not if you’re still bruised from seeing the osteopath the night before).

Anyway, I’ll be back soon. And then the whole adventure will start all over again

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Catching up

Yes, I know things have been a bit quiet round here, but it’s not like it’s been uneventful. There’s been the back-pain drama, there’s been the dental drama (round 2 of drilling and filling today so back on the painkillers again), there was a birthday, which resulted in lovely presents from lovely people, including: 1 proper real-live microphone, Nigel Slater’s fruit cookbook, a book on libretto-writing, one on poetry-writing, 2 seasons of Chuck. Plus of course the presents I bought myself: the iPad (which you know about and seems to become more useful and awesome with every passing day) and Logic Studio, which arrived on the birthday day but took us a couple of days to install due to my having dropped my laptop several months back, meaning that DVDs go into it but can’t really be relied on to come out again… Still working on how to get the software instruments that come with Logic up and running…

So there’s been a lot of playing about with toys. Mostly the ones I bought myself though as I need to get a cable for the mic, I’m finishing up other books before I start the libretto ones and my back has hurt too much to do much cooking (barring a culinary experiment which resulted in an apple-enhanced caramel cake which went down quite well).

So I’ll just slide over the missed days and focus on today. Obviously, I went to the dentist. He says that this should be the last of the deep drilling (thank heavens). Been pretty uncomfy though, but yay for painkillers! And also yay for spectacularly beautiful summer’s day even though it’s only spring! It was so lovely, I decided to walk home instead of catching the bus (which was taking too long and I was also getting bored), so I walked back through the sunshine and the intermittent smell of jasmine, listening to the birds going twit in the hedges and chatting with a friend in Australia via IM. Rather lovely, actually.

Once home I actually didn’t immediately have a nap, as I’d expected. Instead I did some work on my new piece. It’s been a little stuck lately but I managed to prod it forward a little and flesh out some of the earlier parts too.

Then there was tinkering about with Logic Studio. I’m really enjoying using this. Fascinating to discover that the interface basically hasn’t changed since I was using microLogic at uni – 15 years ago! so it’s mostly familiar, and the bits that are less familiar – the audio-editing side of things, isn’t that dissimilar from Pro Tools, so I seem to be picking things up pretty quickly. And I can’t begin to express how much easier and more comfortable it is to work in it, not needing to be tethered to a hardware box at all times. I don’t have to think twice about opening it up for a small sound-file-trimming job. And I’ve discovered some cool stuff – beat mapping to make a MIDI file sound more like it was played by a human than a robot to start with! I borrowed a book from the TVU library yesterday and started working my way through it this afternoon. Finding out some interesting snippets, but I’m hoping I can get away with just borrowing the book and not having to buy it. Would rather spend my birthday Amazon voucher on the Advanced volume

And then when the sun was setting, I got all inspired to grab the iPad and try a little bit of drawing. It’s not great, but it was fun to do and an interesting exercise, messing round with silhouettes and trying to get the sunset colours to blend a bit

Tagged with: art, composition, drawing, EDM, experimenting, learning, music, photography, play, study, tools, walking | Add a comment

iPad triumph!

The big news of the day is that, having managed to reserve an iPad 2 online last night, I actually got into town in time to do so! So now I’m writing this on my very own iPad. Yaaaayyy!

So most of the afternoon has, of course been spent setting it up, loading apps, transferring settings, syncing, etc. And generally playing about, This was taken with the iPad’s camera using PhotoBooth:

Not sure that app will get a huge workout, but hey, it’s fun.

Also did a tiny photo walk today while waiting for Djelibeybi to arrive at Holborn for us to go and fetch the new member of our techno-family together. In the rain. Some nice shots, I think, but they’re on Flickr so I’ll add them in later.

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