Yesterday I opened my blender (no not the one in the kitchen, the one on my ubuntu studio) and was displeased to find a complete makeover of the interface. Blender has maintained a sturdy and loyal interface that many of us have learned to love so if it ain't broken why fix it?

I was not the only one to be performing google searches in order to learn the new shortcuts or find out where had all the old buttons been reassigned to. Oh yes, it really does look like 3d max now and it has certainly migrated from a cartoony look to a more professional looking software but did they really have to change all those shortcuts? Yes they did, and windows users will be able to tell me that changes aren't always a bad thing but hey, I am a taurus after all, so just give me some time to adapt and in the meantime let me do a little ranting.

Anyway, the 33rd episode of my podcast will be out tomorrow at 17:00 UTC-03:00. There's plenty of high speed techno for all those psy-trance lovers out there and this one has a lot more lyrics than usual, I guess the end of the decade has gotten me in a sentimental mood.

This has been by far my most busy month as a dj (4 gigs in 3 weeks say whaaaaaa) and I'm still getting the hang of playing just with cd's and vinyls but I will get there and am happy to be going through the performing-with-no-laptop change.

Animation wise has been pretty sluggish with just some visual loops to go with the new tracks and all that energy has been put to good use on my 3d printer project which is almost almost printing stuff without any issues after almost two years of building it so I'm happy with seeing the light at the end of tunnel with that project, I hope the next time I'm writing I'm talking about all the cool stuff I've been printing.

May the 20's be a prosperous decade for us all.

Hey there, so the past few months have been tons of fun, finishing and publishing my animated short Summer Is Almost Over, for a moment there I thought it could have gotten a trophy or a pick of the week mention, oh well, can't say I didn't learn anything in the process. It took me about 8 or 9 months to get it done and I'm glad I was able to meet the expected deadline Octobur 31. I think the key here was to be realistic on how much time I was willing to put on the animation so instead of planning for 5 days a week work sessions I decided to choose 5 days every month that would be dedicated on the animation. Sure, there was definitely some crunch time by the end of the deadline but I was hardly ever on a situation of stress. I don't have any immediate plans of doing another animation but I'm sure a music video will eventually be on the way. I hope I can use the teachings of my later music video and this animation to get a better result and make the work process better and hassle free.

Regarding music, same ol' same ol electronic podcast only now I'm adding a longer voice over at the end where I give details about the making of each song and I think the overall music quality is on a steady increase so I'm fairly satisfied with what I'm delivering on a monthly basis. Nobody's buying my tracks on bandcamp tho, oh well, welcome to the bedroom producer club I guess.

Other than that I'm looking forward to the upcoming newgrounds music contests, bring it on!

The biggest issue with ads on youtube is the fact that they're trying to show how well they know you, what, you think that the fact that I like to watch final fantasy longplays means that I want to try your stupid clash royale clone? And the same goes for amazon, they think they've got it all sorted out don't they? I'm sure they're so happy with their little algorithms and spreadsheets, well guess what Mr. Corpo guy, people change, and so do their desires, and so do their interests. Do you really think you know what everybody needs? You can't analyse a person through statistics and hope they'll fall into your trap loop hole of guided consumerism. And the idea of product based identity would send us all down the same pit where we'd realize we're all dressing the same, doing the same drugs and watching the same content. Individuality is a lie that's been overpriced, we're all cattle wether we like it or not.

Let me tell you what I've been up to the last few months; the animated short on blender is starting to come together and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel as I progress through the storyboard and even though I know the last stretch is always the longest one I can't help but feel proud of succeeding on this small enterprise. To me success is not exclusive to being frontpaged or getting positive feedback, when I'm done with this project it will be a personal success to have stayed motivated and kept up to the schedule of a year long project.

New projects are always exciting when you're getting started but staying true to an older idea and keeping it on track has an enchantment of its own. Now some of my current projects include a monthly release of a music album and building up a 3D printer from scratch and I think these are two perfect examples of blank slate excitement and long term commitment. On one hand having to come up with fresh concepts for the album release has forced me to keep a broader sense of things and no not linger too much on small details but keeping up with a longer and steady project will fill you with a sense of achievement so I couldn't choose between the two but it has taught me a few things like for example the best way to finish a project is with (yeah, you guessed right) deadlines. If you're making a movie a videogame or even a song make yourself a timeline, then break it up in tasks, then break it up in tasks again till you're analysing how much time will you be spending going to the bathroom (just kidding, but really make a detailed schedule), then add a few more weeks to the deadline because the infamous unexpected will always happen and you will be wondering where the hell did all that time go, so do your future self a favour and add in a few courtesy miscellaneous days to your timeline, ah yes now I can procrastinate in peace.

I'm not too big on templates, I honestly think that doing a repeated action over and over again is one of the definitions of being an artist. But definitions aside having some elements repeated throughout your work will help knitting the project together it could be a snare drum an odd looking scratch on the wall or even a typography cause if you're like me working on seven different blender scenes for a movie it's really easy to feel that there is starting to be little to no correlation between them.

A last thought on long and short term projects, something I've learned like everyone else, the hard way, is too keep it simple, and I think that fortunately newgrounds favours raw energy over technical finnese and it's one of the reasons why I've been always drawn to this website. See, your Pharaonic projections of what your project could possibly be are only keeping you from achieving a finished project, so go ahead and dispose of that huge idea in your head and keep it simple, keep it real, as we would say in Argentina, don't flash.

As I said before, the movie is coming together so here are a few stills of how it's looking.

29 is out too so take a 20 minute break while you listen to it.

Also I didn't make it to the second group stage on the audio deathmatch, oh well, it was good fun though and I still have to come up with a song in case they call from the fill-in pool!

I feel as if nowadays we're bombarded with a wide array of energizing drinks which leads me to think;

why are we so tired?

Are we all under the effect of the same sleep inducing painkillers?

Is restlessness the label of our generation?

Are our urban environments becoming louder and noisier with each passing year?

Or is sleeping for 9 hours just not cool enough for our standards?

I've been experimenting with different sleep cycles, 2018 had been an almost completely nocturnal year waking up at 5 am and going to sleep at 7 in the morning. My logic back then was that I should get used to the DJing work hours as soon as possible if I was to take this seriously but due to several reasons I found myself shifting to a more conventional up at 7:30am and going to sleep around 9:30 in the evening like any mortal human being.

I am also experimenting with biphasic and polyphasic sleep by waking at 1:30 am and remaining awake for about an hour before going back to sleep. That hour period is great for letting your thoughts unravel, it feels an almost out of time moment.

I have also switched from a mattress to a foam mat after reading about many people doing this. After almost a year of sleeping on the floor I can say I don't have any trouble getting to sleep and that it sure makes waking up a lot easier, I'd recommend anybody to give this a try at some point.

Lastly I'm occasionally adding pink noise as background noise to help mask unwanted noise early in the night when neighbors are still active.

Conclusion: By switching my sleep cycles I've been getting a lot more snooze and my creativity is flowing. I know that many feel that a creative state of mind can be achieved doing the opposite and staying awake for extended periods of time but I'll choose to sleep longer and sacrifice a bit of social life and work hours.

I was inspired to write this text after reading a chapter about sleep on David Lynch's Catching The Big Fish. 

Working with someone else’s material is a vital part of learning from other’s successes and mistakes. I guess the equivalent in animation to doing a remix would be all these parodies of pixar and disney movies which are directly inspired by existing material but add to it their personal perspective,

The main challenge in doing a remix is ending up with a result that makes you remember the original part but takes you to a place the original didn’t take you before. But you know what? That’s hardly any news and you probably read that a million times before so I’m gonna try and tell you my experience and maybe it’ll help you with your own remixes.

So I started openly taking inspiration from other artists when I read an article about how progressive rock legend Steven Wilson re-recorded Yes songs in his spare time and I tried doing the same with artists I really looked up to like Kevin Parker or Pedro Aznar. The process would be as simple as carefully listening to the song and then re-record every sound with whatever samples and instruments I had at hand. Artistically speaking this has little value but it helps training your ear (or eye) and pushing your technical capabilities to uncharted territory. But RedSoul92, these are not remixes they’re simply makeovers! Yes I know, and not matter how good you think you are these clones will always be lesser versions of what the original material was, so unless you plan on living under the shadow of someone you look up to I suggest keeping these exercises as technical experiments, in other words, we should restrain from trying to sound exactly like someone, we should restrain from trying to get the exact same style as someone we admire because the truth is we’ll never get to do that due to this simple fact:

We’re not who we aspire to be, we are who we are.

Now after doing these re-recording experiments some time went by and I noticed how many of my records were now sounding like these songs I had copied. I had successfully mimicked their style! woop woop.

But what about my style?

I took a music production course and one of the exercises was about remixing one of our colleagues. I was happy to embark on this new challenge so as soon as I got the required samples I did the remix. But I didn’t stop to think about my colleagues style, hell I didn’t even listen to the goddamn original song and the result was, well the result was a completely different song on it’s own. It didn’t sound anything like the original one. Yay.

Was this a failed attempt?

I think I was blinded by the thrill of doing a song with someone else’s samples, my inspiration came directly from the samples and not the song per se so I guess in this case we’re not talking about a remix at all. Nonetheless it was a fruitful experience that drove me to explore new soundscapes and it definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone but it was not a remix. And this failed remix attempt repeated itself several times after that with the same result, songs that got too far away from the original.

Is there such a thing as excessive creativity?

I’m currently telling myself I need to find a middle point between getting too far away from the original and re-recording a song to the finest detail. My last attempt is in my 2019 June 1 9 9 X podcast, a remix of Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 ending credits song. I still need some time to distance myself from the track but my guess is that it’s an okay remix cause it takes the original track and adds some intensity to it but I still ask myself if I’m not cutting myself short by actively limiting my creativity in order to get more down to earth results. The short answer to this question is don’t limit your creativity, the long answer is somewhere between the lines of this block of text I’ve just written.

It's been really fun playing my annual gig at the local downtown venue but what learning did I get out of it?

Don't push it with the invites, don't go haywire extending your invitation to whoever crosses your mind, sure, a packed place will get the owner satisfied but you don't have to play to a big crowd. In fact, playing to a smaller audience will give a closer connection, you'll have time to greet and if they are not that many you can even give them small presents and gifts as a token of appreciation for showing up. In my case I got to play the 17th of May, international day of hypertension, so mid-show I got everybody to count their heartbeat and shout it out back to me, sure it was embarrasing for some people but it was also fun and informative, not to mention healthy. So yeah, try to make it as personal as possible without making them uncomfortable. They're probably coming to see just you so don't go getting all high horsed and act like you're playing at an arena to a crowd you can't even look at the in the eyes.

If it's okay with the owner try to get people in the scenario, the 4th wall is very thin during a small gig and can be easily broken to decrease unnecessary distance between the performer and the audience. This time I got one friend to, at the very beggining, get up on stage and read out loud a text he'd written and was afraid to post online. Even big bands enjoy having the audience come up on stage and sing along with them.

If you're playing your own songs or rarely heard-of covers hand out a page with lyrics, if your tunes are catchy enough you'll have the audience singing along with you in the best christmas carol style.

If you have an invited artist or band make sure they find themselves at ease in the venue, show them around where can they put their equipment and let them know beforehand when's the sound check, if there is one.

Some people will take a hike as soon as you're done playing so make sure you let them know if there's a featured show after you. They'll be glad to be getting the full bang out of their entrance fee.

Last but certainly not least, picture yourself playing at the venue, what are you wearing? Are you wearing anything at all? Are you standing or sitting down? Where do you place yourself in the scenario? Last time I played I chose to sit on the edge of the scenario facing the crowd, sure, the sound engineer wasn't crazy about me not having any feedback at all from the on-stage speakers but it was worth having a laugh with the people on the first row and getting to see their expressions. Make a drawing of yourself playing there, you'll be amazed of how close it was to the actual thing.

Playing a gig is like organizing a birthday party? How do your birthdays look like? You do have a birthday, right?

Hey newgrounders, I'm signing in to drop the usual monthly music podcast where I upload no less than three new tracks I've worked on. Episode twenty-five and counting, yeah it might not be the biggest podcast out there but what makes it special, to me at least, is the constant evolution I've seen throughout the releases. I'm clearly still on the lookout for my a style that I can call my own but there's seems to be a certain sense of ambience and emotion that remains constant. This 2019 April edition is as vaporwavy and as synthwavy as I'm currently capable of producing in a time spectrum of 30 days. As an organizational tool I had a calendar done with daily tasks such as mastering, mixing, producing and description writing. I had some help with the cover art which I'm really grateful for as it gave me time to dedicate on side projects. One of the side projects I'm most excited about is a short 3D animation based on a comic book I did when I was a kid. It's really fun to translate a hand-drawn storyboard into a fully-textured 3D scene, there's the challenges of having to determine the angle of the camera or decide how long will a shot last for. I haven't had any technical formation on camera angles so I'm basing everything on inuition and whatever I can recall from movies I've seen. I expect finishing rendering all of the frames by September, that should give me time to get n recording voices and fx's as well as doing the editing. If everything goes well the animation should be out on halloween this year. In the meantime give a listen to these four tracks and let me know what you think.

RedSoul92 signing out.

<https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/860114>

This logic is based on the belief that temporary dettachment can result in a better creative output and in viewing a bigger picture of the general idea through a new perspective.

When I started getting serious on music production I realized my day wouldn't just consist of creating new music on a daily basis, on the contrary, it was just a part of it. But how do we organize the chaos of creative output? 

Well I decided to keep things simple and divide my workflow into three primary tasks or colours;

• Yellow for everything related to writing and networking, this post right here would have probably been a short list of track names and their duration if writing hadn't been added as a primary task. I believe it helps prevent isolation and any high-horseness that might result in working as a solo artist. The task of exteriorizing through a written medium creates a fictional reader that must be taken into account and thought of, it may as well be the very first approach that we have to the public.
• Cyan is the colour related to visual media such as cover art, animations and art in general. A lot of the work related to cyan goes through a 3D filter that helps give the image some sturdiness, also the possibility of animating through 3D is a big plus. There is a constant feedback between audio and video, sometimes a single image will be the idea that sparks the whole project.
• Magenta to me means sound and music. The dynamic of composition can get quite messy sometimes leading to overproduction. It might get tempting to start a new song from scratch but more than often the wise choice is to look for any half-finished project and give them their well-deserved final touch. A great idea that might have not ocurred to you then could be just what the piece is lacking and the satisfaction of knowing the quality of your work is becoming more and more balanced can be greater than the serotonin boost of the blank page.

I believe a simple systematization like this one can go a long way when working solo, at the very least it'll make you see the bigger picture and you're less likely to feel like your blindingly digging a hole.

Here's a monthly calendar image in which every day has been assigned a specific colour

right so, number 23, anybody seen that movie? Jim Carrey going haywaire over a number? okay, for those who haven't there's such a thing as the 23 engima were events are ruled by the number 23 and human beings from all walks of life seem to come to the agreement that 23 is indeed a very creepy number, but then again, isn't everything potentially creepy? the human brain has the capacity of turning anything into a scray thought. Hold on, I'm not saying watching the movie was a complete waste of my not so valuable time, on the contrary, it actually pushed me on giving the podcast a slightly different turn, maybe go for a darker and more mysterious vibe than the usual brightness that accompanies my music, but that presented a problem since my sometimes overly organized nature had driven me to pre-produce the separate tracks and have them ready for mixing. So I had five tracks that had nothing to do with this newly found 23 aesthetic.

How do we add mystery? I kept asking myself this question and looking for inspiration on noir fiction like Max Payne, adventure stoires like Myst and more 23 enigma content like german film 23, even creepypasta.org served me as inspiration.

But to what conclusion did I arrive after all this information frenzy? Numbers are blank slates and contain no meaning unless we give them one.

if you must go on with this rambling give a listen to the 23 minute podcast (omg it's 23 minutes long)