The incomplete songwriter: a self-critical look

the Previous, April 1996 (photo by Andrew Eckert)

Today, while I was playing guitar, I decided to fire up the old iMac** in order to see if I had any files of lyrics from the Previous, the band I was a part of in college. I had found a folder last week in the basement that contained some lyrics, posters, letters and such, and I wanted to see if there were any others on the computer. There weren’t, but I did have several years worth of my own attempts at songwriting stored there.

Sitting there with my guitar, I began opening files from as early as 2001. Some songs had chord notations, but most of them were just verse. I couldn’t remember half of the songs at all, and there were others where I could only remember how the chorus was sung. Most of the songs are incomplete.

* * * * *

Looking at those songs served as a painful reminder that, for me, songwriting has always been very difficult. I get a lot of pleasure out of being creative, but I’m rarely happy with the results. Off the top of my head, here is how I would grade myself on some random elements of the songwriting process:

• Coming up with guitar parts: A-
• Coming up with a melodic hook or two: B+
• Coming up with a lyrical hook or two: B
• Completing the first verse: C
• Completing the chorus: B-
• Completing the second verse: D-
• Song construction/completion: D
• Writing “good” lyrics: C-
• Intros/outros: B

There are some interesting issues that I’ve been thinking about, relative to the subject of my own songwriting. I’ve always said that I felt confident in my ability to write music, but that I struggled with lyrics. However, looking at the list above, it’s somewhat obvious that there are a lot of areas where I’m deficient.

One major issue that causes a lot of problems for me is that I have a severely overactive internal censor. The censor works overtime in a couple of different ways. For one thing, I’m always wary of borrowing too many ideas from another songs. Sometimes I think that I’m too wary of this, and I think that it stems from the fact that, in the early days, I wrote music that was completely derivative of what was popular at the time. My guitar-playing (and songwriting) was in its infancy, and I didn’t have many musical tools to work with. As I began to branch out, with regard to both what I listened to and what I was able to do with the guitar, the need to censor myself began to lessen, but the habit of over-censoring myself is one that has been very difficult to break ever since.

The problem with too much self-censorship is that one begins to kill off ideas before they can be tinkered with, reworked, or fleshed out. While many great songwriters and songwriting teams record their ideas and jams, in order to cull the good bits and use them to write a song, I tend to try to work linearly; that is, I come up with an idea, decide if it’s “good,” and then work on it until I reach a stopping point. That stopping point may be time, frustration, fatigue, interruption, or something else, but it’s rarely because the song is complete. Additionally, I usually do not record what I’ve come up with – regardless of what I think about it – free of judgment. Over the course of an hour, I might have ten musical ideas, reject five of them, forget two others, and run into a brick wall with the other three. In the end, I have a fraction of the material that I could have had. I’ve lost many potentially good ideas this way, and regretted it later.

Some of what I’m writing here is about not recording my ideas, and that is simply laziness and a lack of focus. However, it ties in with the self-censorship issue, because it’s all part of an even larger problem.

* * * * *

The major problem that I have with my own songwriting is a lack of confidence in my abilities. I also do not like my own voice, which has killed a lot of recordings for me. The lack of confidence leads directly to several behaviors that are detrimental to my songwriting process and my enjoyment of the experience:

• Over-censorship.
• Not taking the time to record my ideas, either through written notation or via a sound recording.
• Giving up on a work in progress before it’s finished (and never picking it up again).
• Periods of dormancy, where I don’t try because “I’m not a good songwriter anyway.”
• Attempting to write more interesting and challenging music to make up for my struggling lyric-writing skills. Most of the time, this only increases the level of difficulty for writing lyrics that work with the music, and usually ends with an incomplete song.

If I am going to have any success with, and enjoy the process of, songwriting, I need to address some of these issues. I need to work smarter. (I also need to “lighten up” a bit.) It is my hope that having a dedicated workspace for writing and recording music in my home will make it easier to reverse some of my mental and behavioral inhibitions about the songwriting process.

* * * * *

** Note: I recently set up my old iMac (2006, duo-core processor, 150GB hard drive) again. It has been largely neglected since I bought my new one last December, mainly because it was suffering from terrible performance issues.

Earlier in the summer, I was toying with just wiping the hard drive and reinstalling the OS. However, a week or two ago I decided to try removing some files and programs, with the idea that it was simply bogged down with (what is now) unnecessary stuff. So I trashed World of Warcraft and all of my addons, about 50GB of music, and some other files that I no longer need. When I was done with that, I started up a couple of applications, Safari and Microsoft Office, that had been giving me problems. I didn’t expect too much – these are applications that had taken a minute or more to open previously, but lo and behold, they opened within a reasonably short time!

I would like to continue to record music with that computer. While my new iMac is in the main part of the apartment and gets the bulk of my attention, the old one is in a back bedroom along with my guitars and amps. It’s a relatively quiet area, and I am trying to get it organized so that the environment is more conducive to playing and recording.

Half-Life 2 (OS X); of mice and Macs

Half-Life 2 (OS X)!

I read on gameinformer.com yesterday that Half-life 2 (OS X) would be released today via Steam – an idea that excites me, as I played Half-Life on a PC, but only got through some of Half-Life 2 on the 360. I was particularly curious to see what the price point would be, and if they would make the episodes available as well.

As of early this afternoon, all three games are available, and at acceptable prices.

Half-Life 2 – $9.99 (on sale for $6.99)

Episode 1 – $7.99 (on sale for $5.59)

Episode 2 – same as Episode 1

Yeah… I’ll totally be downloading them!

Anyway, I was reading about it on GI.com last night. It’s a short article, so I watched the trailer, and then began to peruse the comments.

Comment QQ (by me)

It’s interesting to see the comments that people leave sometimes. It seems that, with more attention being paid to Mac gaming these days, every time new titles are announced for Mac, there’s an asshat who says something like what I read yesterday:

“All you Mac users out there, have fun playing an FPS with only one mouse button.”

Which irritates me to some extent, because… in this particular instance, I checked the guy’s GI.com profile. He lists his occupation as Contract Game Tester, and game design as one of his hobbies. He has a few blog posts and a game review, which are written fairly intelligently, and describes himself as a hardcore gamer.

So why would someone like that assume that all Mac users are using the mouse that Apple provides (and make derisive comments to that effect)?

Is that type of comment motivated by the desire to ridicule Mac users, due to a perceived elitist attitude that all Mac users must have? Is there a maturity issue here? Or do people really think that a Mac gamer who is interested in playing an FPS would fumble around for hours, trying to play a game that they just spent their hard-earned money on, without a) trying to make adjustments in the Preferences section, or b) going out and getting a new mouse?

A short history of my experience with mice and Macs (super boring, btw!)

When I started playing WoW, I immediately ran into problems with the Apple mouse. So I went out and got a wireless Logitech mouse, which worked, but not too well. At some point I got frustrated with it, and borrowed a Dell mouse from a friend… and that worked alright, although it never satisfied me.

Early last fall, I plunked down $50 or so for the Razer DeathAdder 3G for Mac. I ordered it from Amazon, and when it arrived a couple of days later, I was in heaven. Here was a mouse that was smooth and precise, comfortable, and allowed for very high tracking speed if desired. It also came with two mappable thumb-buttons, which I found very useful at times. As someone who never mapped all of his abilities to his keyboard, like I apparently should have, this was great because it gave me much better control with minimal hand movement.

And the mouse didn’t fail. Ever. The network or server would fail occasionally, but never the mouse. It has been a dream to use, to this day.

In addition to gaming, this mouse works very well for everything else that I want to do on my Mac, for all of the same reasons. It’s apparently not available anymore, but in reality there are several excellent mice, even those that aren’t made specifically for Macs, that would perform similarly.

Conclusions

• I think that the Apple mice, which have always been somewhat gimmicky, would suffice in many casual gaming situations, but any Mac user with a need and an opportunity to pick up a more appropriate mouse will probably do so.
• If nothing else, owners of MacBooks will pick up a mouse if they plan on gaming or doing other mouse-heavy tasks. No owner of a Mac made in the past five-plus years is limited to only buying an Apple mouse.
• I suppose that the source of my irritation is a low tolerance for derisive/unconstructive dialogue, which is admittedly one of my personal failings.
• On the other hand, while I prefer to use a Mac, I respect those who use PCs. There may be a Mac vs. PC war that’s been going on for years now on TV, but it doesn’t mean that using one or the other is indicative of a person’s intelligence.
• Half-Life 2 for Mac! Woo hoo!

Steam for Mac goes live with free Portal download

On Wednesday afternoon (May 12), Steam for Mac went live, much to my delight.

In celebration of this new opportunity To promote the upcoming Portal 2 release, Steam is currently running an offer through May 24th where you can download the full original Portal for free for PC and Mac.

I already have a copy of Portal as part of the Half-Life 2: Orange Box collection on Xbox 360. However, the opportunity to play Portal on my computer instead, for the price of a few clicks and the download time, was too good to pass up. I downloaded it this evening, and after dinner I spent a half-hour playing through several of the puzzles to get a feel for it.

The port from PC to Mac seems to be flawless. The game looks great, and is extremely easy to control “right out of the box.” I’m excited to have something to play on my computer (other than playing “blogger,” “Facebook,” “check email,” and “catch up on feed reader”) while I’m in the midst of moving and adjusting to a WoW-free lifestyle.

I’ve been waiting for Steam for Mac to go live since they announced it, and am already salivating at the possibilities. Torchlight is on sale for $9.99 until Monday, and I’m already grappling with whether or not I want to snag that one. Braid is available for Mac, as is World of Goo. I’m curious to see what kinds of games are released for Mac via Steam in the near future, and wondering if more of the bigger titles that are available for PC are going to be ported to Mac.

All in all, it’s an exciting time for gamers with Macs. The potential for a greater variety of titles and genres is encouraging, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this effects my gaming habits this year.

Update on my iMac, new faster Macbook Pros available

The hot new Macbook line

The new Macbook Pro laptops are now available from Apple. I got an email yesterday notifying me that I can now order an I5- or I7-equipped Macbook Pro, which is good news for people who have been waiting to have a Macbook with quad-core processing.

Not that I’ll be ordering one. This beast is going to have to last me a few years!

I was disheartened, however, to see that the core of the exterior design is still the aluminum enclosure. I say this because when I was shopping for my iMac, which included looking at Macbooks as an option, I did read customer comments regarding the issue of heat.

I ended up getting the 27″ iMac last December, and I love it. I know that I had promised that I would write more about it, and I haven’t. It’s fast, efficient, has plenty of hard drive space, and sweet graphics. Music sounds great on it, WoW plays very well at maximum graphic levels, it multi-tasks flawlessly… The one issue that I have with it is how hot it gets.

The iMac’s one-piece aluminum enclosure conducts heat extremely well – that is, to say, it conducts heat at a somewhat alarming level. I’ve been running iTunes and Safari for the past couple of hours, and if I close my hand over the top edge of the screen, the aluminum feels almost uncomfortable to touch. When I’m running Ventrilo, WoW and Safari during raids, the aluminum most definitely is uncomfortable to touch.

I downloaded iStat this afternoon, and it says my hard drive is running at 124°F, and the power supply is holding steady at 153°F.  iStat doesn’t measure the temperature of the outer shell (although it does give the “ambient” temperature as 81°F currently), but with several components running above 140°F, and an aluminum enclosure, it’s no wonder that I have a mini space heater on my desk.

This leads me to my concern with these Macbooks. Knowing how hot my iMac gets, and even considering that there may be some type of temperature mitigation in place in the laptops, I wonder how comfortable it would be to use a Macbook on a plane, a couch, student lounge, or other situation where the computer is on a person’s lap. I’ve used other laptops, and while they get warm, the heat is nowhere as intense as it is with my machine.

Apple seems married to aluminum bodies, and I suppose that using a laptop on a table would not be as much of an issue. However, I can say that, when it’s time for me to purchase another Mac, I hope that they will have decided to use a different material for the exterior of their products. I’m not too excited about how comfortable I’m going to be in front of my computer during the upcoming summer months.

Open Office impressions

As I mentioned a while ago, I bought a new iMac last fall. When the new ones were announced in October, including the 27″ version with quad core processors, I was overjoyed. On December 7th, I had received my new iMac and was up and running.

One of the things I didn’t repeat on this, the second iMac I’ve purchased, was buying Microsoft Office along with it. I had picked up Office 2004 when I bought my old iMac in ’06, and while it got plenty of use, I wasn’t entirely happy with it. I also wasn’t too psyched about buying Office 2008 for this machine, because in my mind, the extra $150 on top of the (very large) cost of the rest of the purchase did not outweigh the benefits of having any Office installed on my computer.

So it has been a month and a half, and I’m loving the new computer. However, not having a writing application or ability to do spreadsheets was hampering my style. I track my finances in a spreadsheet, live by a budget, etc, and I had always used Excel for that. I also missed being able to create documents for songwriting, list-making, letters and offline composition, etc.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I had read that the there are some online clients that you can use for word processors, and one day I was reading a blog that discussed pros and cons of some of them when I remembered talking with my dad about Open Office a few years ago. Open Office is a free suite of apps that can basically do all that Microsoft Office can.

I downloaded it that morning (it was almost two weeks ago), and while I’ve only used the word processor and spreadsheet thus far, it definitely has a lot of utility. Like Office, it has the previously mentioned functions, plus database, presentation, and draw features. Since it’s “open,” you can create and save documents with a variety of extensions, including Office’s .doc, that give it a versatility as far as sharing files goes. I’m not sure how many other people will need to open anything I produce with Office, but the simple fact that it works so similarly to Office, but without that Microsoft cumbersomeness about it, is satisfying and refreshing.

I’m not a techie, and I don’t spend all of my time writing and producing presentations and working with databases, so I don’t have anything that resembles a detailed review of Open Office here. I just wanted to throw out there that I have a positive impression of the software so far. It gives me the ability to dispense with my old iMac sooner than I had thought, because I can do all of my finances and writing on it, which is something I had not counted on when I bought this one sans Microsoft Office.

Beginning the lossless project

Happy New Year!

On Christmas Day, after we opened presents, I began loading some of my music, both gifts and older music, onto the new iMac. As I think I have said before, I came to the conclusion that I would like to selectively load music onto the new machine in the Apple Lossless format, which does not compress music files like MP3 or ACC formats do. This, of course, means that the files take up much more space, so I figured that, by selecting only songs that I know I like, I can put a decent amount of music on the 1TB drive without filling it up.

Today I am throwing a few more albums on. So far, I am only choosing artists/albums where I know I like everything.

Some of the first albums that I chose:

1. Vince Guaraldi – A Charlie Brown Christmas
2. Nick Drake – Pink Moon
3. Miles Davis – Kind Of Blue
4. R.E.M. – Accelerate
5. Pearl Jam – Ten (2009 Brendan O’Brien Remix)
6. Loreena McKennitt – Live In paris And Toronto (Disc 1)
7. Eric Clapton – Sessions For Robert J
8. The Nightwatchman – One Man Revolution
9. Lou Reed – Perfect Night Live In London
10. Pink Floyd – Dark Side Of The Moon
11. Nirvana – Bleach (2009 Remastered/Expanded edition)
12. Blind Faith – Blind Faith

One of the things that I’ve realized, over the course of looking at my CD collection, is that I’m going to have to buy some of these CDs again. Early CDs released in the 1980s of groups from the 60s and 70s had poor fidelity. Of course, some of my favorite releases are from that time period, so what music I have from bands such as Cream, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, etc. are poor quality versions. Since I was in high school and college when I bought them, I got many of them from record clubs and used stores anyway, so I have no qualms about buying the remastered/expanded editions over again.

Downloading them from iTunes is not an option, since they do not offer them in the lossless format. I prefer getting the CD anyway, so I will probably be ordering a few new ones pretty soon, starting with Cream.

Dragon Age: Origins … for Mac!

Tonight, on a whim, I went to Direct2Drive.com to look at games available for Mac… and discovered that Dragon Age: Origins was released for Mac on December 21st.

Merry Christmas / Happy Birthday to me!

Well, maybe.

I’ve already picked up the 360 version, although I haven’t opened it yet. I’ve been debating whether or not I’d like to go ahead and play that one, or wait and try to play the “PC” version. I’m going to wait a short while to see if I can find any reviews for the Mac port. Apparently, ports of high-quality games to the Mac rarely yield equally high-quality results, so my initial excitement is tempered by a bit of a reality check when considering this point…

Dragon Age: Origins is the rage at my store. Almost all of my employees have played it, or are still playing it. They talk about it all of the time. Fortunately, I’ve managed to avoid taking in too much of what they’ve said. What has really grabbed my interest is the series of articles that Andrew is writing as he progresses through the game. While there are spoilers, the descriptions of his experiences, along with some choice screenshots, are compelling.

One way or another, I’m going to play this game!

Tonight: the setup

8:45pm

I’m in the middle (ok, the middle of the beginning) of installing World of Warcraft on my new iMac. It’s going to be a while, so I’m chilling on vent with my guildmates, kind of bored, and figured I’d write a little while bit about my first impressions of this beast.

First of all, this screen is HUGE!! I’ve always played WoW in a window anyway on my 17″ screen, but with this machine, I’ll be able to have the game open, along with a full web page and vent visible at the same time.

The screen is beautiful. I haven’t run the game yet or watched any other video, but I do have WoW running on my old iMac to the right of where I’m sitting. The old screen pales in comparison… I know that’s a cliche, but it’s absolutely true in this instance. It looks like it’s dark outside, on my old computer screen, no matter what I’m looking at, now that I’ve seen the new display. I’ve been to a few web sites this evening, and everything looks clean and vibrant. I’m enjoying even typing this blog, visually.

I have very little other experience with it. The keyboard is flat and feels great, although I don’t know if I will use it for raiding, at least initially. I already know I’m not using the Magic Mouse for WoW, because I haven’t had good success with wireless peripherals with that game. I’m sticking with my Razer DeathAdder for now.

…

So it’s 10:55 pm now, and I’m downloading patches for WoW. This is going to take a while, and I don’t think that there will be much more that I have to add to this post. So I’ll sign off. As I said, I’m sure I’ll have updates in the near future.

Lunch break with my new pal, the iMac box

I’m sitting here on my lunch break, quietly eating my sandwich. My new iMac rests comfortably in its HUGE box next to me. It’s too bad I have to be back at work in 15 minutes, because I’d love to tear this thing open and get going!

So they delivered it two days earlier than I thought, which is awesome! I’ll have more details and maybe some photos over the next couple of days, as I get it set up and start configuring it, etc.

Update: status on the new iMac

I checked Fedex’s website today, and it looks like my new iMac arrived in Tennessee this morning. It lists an estimated arrival time of 10:30am on Wednesday. I can’t wait (well, I can, because I have to, but…) until then – it’s my next day off, and I’ll have most of the day to spend a few hours kicking the tires, loading WoW, downloading some stuff, and rearranging my desk area to make room for it. I’m excited – the wait is almost over!