Boots-n-Cats 008: AT HOME DEPOT

I had the same anxiety this week about putting together a quality episode that I had last week; it is becoming a trend. The whole process seems so fragile and unlikely to bear fruit when I'm trying to find 16+ new songs I like and stitch them together into a cohesive package. While the act of mixing still presents challenges and room to improve, I find that the stress of the project turns to excitement every week once I determine track ordering. The life skill I hope to eventually develop is to trust myself and not stress out so much just because I cannot see the exact outcome of a situation.

There are generally three keystone songs that define each week for me. This week the keystone songs were Indigo, Lay It All On Me, and Napoleon. My wife likes to pick on obtuse lyrical elements of house music, so when I heard Indigo I knew that "AT HOME DEPOT! I can do this" was going to become a household thing ... and it was. Lay It All On Me just makes me want to sing every time I hear it; it's so uplifting and was the first sure pick for the week I found. Napoleon was a result of me listening to more progressive trance recently in hopes of widening the variety of the show. Being in the 138 bpm category means that it doesn't really play nice with others, but I found it too special to leave out just because of its "social difficulties". It took some finessing, but I managed to find a home for Napoleon as the closer, and I'm glad I put in the effort to make space for it. Until next week, cheers!

Boots-n-Cats 007: Tabula Rasa

For the first week since I've been putting together the podcast, I didn't look forward to the sight of a blank spreadsheet.  I was happy enough with 006 that I was convinced I couldn't do better and didn't really want to try.  I mean I did continue on (obviously), except not with the enthusiasm of "maybe this week I can do better" but instead the certainty that I could not.

An interesting thing came out of that feeling, though.  The palette of songs I arrived at had more range than normal.  Several songs were very dark, seething monsters ("Dance On My Heart", "Morphine", and "Chased") juxtaposed with more melodic, deep songs like "Metaphysical", "Thought of You", and "All My Love".  I was skeptical that they could all be blended together, but I had the attitude of "welp, it's not as going to turn out as well as last week anyway, so might as well take some risks; what is there to lose?"  Although it took some wrangling, I personally think the risks paid off.

I wonder what I can do next week....

Boots-n-Cats 006: Tools are made to be broken

 
In last week's post I mentioned that I ended up determining my track layout for 005 by mapping the tracks to a particular emotional context (in that case a typical day).  The process of mapping was so useful, in fact, that I set out this week to do the same thing from the outset.  Once I had my overall theme, I broke that into 5 suites and quickly found about 3-4 songs for each suite.  "Magnificent!", I thought.  I must be really on to something here ... except that I wasn't.  What seemed like a good idea at first ended up constraining me later on, keeping certain songs in the mix that I wasn't wild about, pushing songs together that didn't fit, etc.

After three days of trying to force my mapping to work I came to a realization:  the mapping was just a tool of my own creation.  I had devised the concept to help me, but it was now hurting me, and that I was free to alter it or abandon it completely, which I ultimately did.  I feel like this sort of occurrence is a common trap people fall into, the idea of keeping loyalty to the initial vision of a project at the expense of its successful completion.  I'm happy with myself that I could identify the fallacy and move past it in this instance.

The podcast this week is my favorite to listen to so far that I've made.  Sifting to find the tracks, mixing everything together, and listening for small adjustments has been the happiest I've been this week by far.  The final product is not perfect, to be certain, but it is something I love.  I can feel myself improving even just through the process this week.  I'm both thrilled with the final product and terrified about starting over from scratch next week and trying to top it, but I guess that's always the challenge set before us: to do better.

Until next week, cheers!

Boots n Cats: New Logo!

First cut at the new logo; it's ... yellow!  Also working on banner design.

Cell-Shading: Week 1

I've been trying to figure out how to get into digital drawing for several months now.  It's difficult to get into a new hobby when you have so little time to throw at it a week.  The first obstacle is that I'm out of practice sketching.  After a few weeks of failed sketching attempts, I decided I'd first work on cell shading.  This required getting someone else more talented to do the sketching for me, so I commissioned Lita Tachibana through her Patreon account to do a sketch a week for me.  The first week's sketch was of my friend's character Alatyr.

(Video of the sketch process can be found here)

I found a couple tutorials on the web for cell-shading in GIMP and tried my hand at shading the above image.  The main takeaway for this week was the value of the layers in keeping the colors separate so that you can adjust them later.  Layers also made it a bit easier to be quick and reckless in places than I could have been otherwise.

I still have a long way to go with knowing where to put the shadows and highlights, not to mention how to blend them effectively.  The shadow and highlight process seems to go easily in the tutorials, but I never seem to have quite the same luck.  All in all, for the first week I'm pretty happy with the results.  I'll likely come back and start from scratch before actually using this image for anything, but it's done for now nonetheless!

Boots-n-Cats 005: A Day In The Life

Every week I have slightly different challenges putting together the podcast. This week I was inundated with new material for a change (50 songs on the final spreadsheet!). The wealth of new material certainly made the process of sifting through it all to find more burdensome, but it was a quite enjoyable problem to solve. The biggest challenge, however, was deciding how to organize all the songs into a coherent format that flowed. I didn't have much time early in the week to experiment with just jamming songs together like I did last week. I knew I wanted to start with the Arty remix of Lauren Aquilina's "Ocean", but that was all that I knew for several days.

The paradigm I ultimately decided on for this week's episode was "a day in the life". I mapped the songs I had culled down into a rough outline of how I felt on a typical work day: morning workout, driving to work, morning chaos, midday break, afternoon chaos, drive home, evening with the family, and time for reflection. Once that idea occurred to me the ordering fell out in maybe twenty minutes.

A powerful realization I had this week was the ability this podcast process has on improving my mood. I started listening to new podcasts last Friday and found that dramatically improved my mood for the rest of the work day. I also realized this week that I look forward to Mondays instead of dreading them like my coworkers do, since Monday is my first chance to listen to my favorite podcasts. There is also that first moment of starting a new song spreadsheet for the week. It's the moment of having to begin the task of assembling a whole new podcast again in just 7 days, largely from scratch. It's the moment that I figured I would fear and become panicked by when I first started this process, but it has instead become the moment in the week in which I feel the most free, empowered, and optimistic.