I recently picked up a keyboard and a drum pad off of craigslist locally in the pursuit of making more musical ideas come to life. Romantically, I considered the fact that it is good to have such tools in the house for the kids should they want to pursue dreams of playing instruments. One interesting problem you face with such things today is they all plug into your computer over USB and then you require software in order to program them to hear them the way you would like. This software is usually called a Digital Audio Workstation or DAW. This software allows you to choose whether or not you want to play a grand piano or an organ for the keyboard. For the drumpad you can modify it to use drum samples or essentially use it to make rhythmic beats.
I have no idea what software to use as I have used Fruity Loops before and for editing audio in the past 4 years or so I have just used Audacity. It is interesting, getting to the point where you want to make things and you push the limits of the creative tool and have to move to a more contractor grade one and then the 80/20 rule starts over again. I have reached this in video editing as well going from Filmora Wondershare which can do a lot to trying to learn Adobe Premiere yet again. I wrote something about this once upon a time of the idea of decision fatigue induced paralysis as just being procrastination in a clever disguise and i think that 80% of the time that is likely true – pick a tool and use it until it can’t do what you need it to anymore and move to the better tool.
Another one of the things that I was working on with audio is ripping my ps2 iso’s and then grabbing assets off of them – ideally I would like to grab visual assets as well as the audio ones but I am not building maps or 3d models so the iso will be lying in wait for me to do this. I found a really good tool but it must me on my old computer. I moved computers and I hardly ever do that so things are a bit of a mess.
The last hole I have fallen down is getting the best tutorials / assets for videos in the form of after effects and fonts. I think that fonts can really be make or break for a lot of things visually and I want to make sure I have a good repo to choose from.
Part of the issue at hand is that the pursuits I am currently pursuing are largely built in mediums I have no history in. If I want to make a video, eventually I am going to want to control the soundscape. I love graphic design / visual static memetics as well but I just end up with lists of ideas and it feels like I haven’t made any progress. This is categorically untrue as I have had more creative output this year than any year previously but it can still feel so daunting at times to be at the novice level across so many things that I would love to have mastery over.
Publishing late but written on 12/02/22