InVisible

Tonight at Kammertheater Stok: Philipp Schaufelberg, Pierre Favre and Dietmar Fuhr - a great concert, lots of improvisation and long discussions with Philipp and Dietmar afterwards at the bar. Nothing more to say, than that it was a really enjoyable evening Daniela and I had. Now that the kids are growing up, we start to live a life as a couple again - and that feels just great after 15 years of handling kids. ...

Why do just one course at a time, when you can do two? The correct answer, of course, is that you should always be learning (I gave up on the third concurrent course though…) Concurrently with the Music Production course I took Pat Pattisons “Introduction to Songwriting” class. As you know, I have been semi serious about playing guitar the last year, and been singing quite a bunch of the “standard” songs. Why not learn how they are written? ...

The “Introduction to Music Production” course has ended and in the next days I will get a certificate stating that I participated in it. All nice and well, but the important thing is the amount of stuff I have learnt. This post is a recap of the last 6 weeks, with the main takeaways of each week (as well as the assignments I recorded) Week 1 - Sound and Signal Flow Basics, basics, basics - things that I had “known” for years (decades even) but nicely packaged together. And I picked up quite a few things: Difference between TS and TRS cables (unbalanced mono or either balanced mono or stereo), polar patterns on microphones, difference between dynamic and condensor microphones, the realization, that GarageBand wouldn’t be cutting it for the next weeks and the need to choose another DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) - hopefully without spending a couple of hundred bucks on it. ...

Meta: This was written a few days ago - instead of a longer post. I just noticed, that I didn’t publish it… As I near the end of my 100 days (only 16 days or so to go) I feel that I have less and less to say - I will therefore just post this instead of todays post and go to bed instead - how does that sound? To me, it sounds great… ...

The sunday house cleaning saw my wife working on the kitchen while I was in the roof, re-purposing old and new electronics to create a more permanent home studio. 1 2008 MacPro (now that it is not powerful enough to compute BitCoins anymore) 1 22" Monitor 1 old Ikea Desk 1 Sonos ZP100 with speakers (instead of monitor speakers) 1 Logitech Mouse 1 M-Audio Fast Track 1 Yeti USB Microphone 1 1996 Fender Telecaster 1 Norman B18 1 Ibanez Combo Amp 1 Bose ME-70 1 ADA MP-1 Tube PreAmp (No, I don’t play nowhere near as good as this guy) 1 Roland A300 Pro Reaper DAW u-he Zebra and Diva (love those analogue sounds) ...

As I finished my “formal” education at the University of Liverpool in 2011, the MOOCs started to rise. It started with Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvigs “Introduction to A.I.” and Andrew Ngs “Machine Learning”. Both Sebastian and Andrew have started their own MOOC startups: Udacity and Coursera. Udacity is focused on Computer Science, Math, while Coursera has courses from totally different aspects of learning. I have had wonderful learning experiences with both of them, and I’m really enjoying the Berklee college of music classes I have taken (and where I’ve learnt an enormous lot outside of my “regular” topics) and looking forward to the next one on improvisation. ...