The best laid plans...

The past couple of nights I've spent a few hours working on my new (used) Mac that I bought last August. There's been a ton of boring / frustrating technical stuff to handle with my migration from my Mac Mini: cloning the hard drive, installing programs and updates, resolving licensing issues, troubleshooting crashes, etc. However I'm pretty good at resolving these kind of issues, having 28 years of experience. I've got it mostly working with Cubase 6.51 and I recorded about 19 seconds of music last night. That sounds ridiculous, the fact that seconds of creative work cost hours of technical bullshit, but I always feel a real sense of accomplishment when I make new songs.

My personal goal for 2012 is to resuscitate all my old recordings and put them in updated file formats so I can use them / finish them. I have a lot more to go. So far I have around 25 mp3's between 20 seconds and 6 minutes long. It's maybe 5% of my recordings since 1991 and doesn't include many of the 200 or so songs I've written (most have never been recorded). But I'm getting better at music production and I quite enjoy creating melodies. By the way, my songs are mostly in Logic, ProTools, and Cubase, with the earliest / most difficult to recover songs in Vision format.

I realize these efforts will never earn money, nor win me the girl, but it's a calling. Plus it keeps me busy and is somewhat better than hanging out in a bar, kvetching about how shitty my life is. I know I'm a lucky guy every day that I wake up. I just wish I could afford to spend more time on my passion for music, and less time doing prep-work and file management.

Status

Busy getting the Mac Pro online, installing and learning upgrades to Cubase, Halion, and ProTools. My goal for 2012 is to rescue all my previous music files, updating them to current versions of Logic, Cubase, and ProTools which will force me to do more with music and update my skills.

new songs

2011 promises to be the most productive year since my divorce. I'm writing new material, bit by bit, and getting back into audio production with my band (Bandersnatch). The guitarist in the band is tremendously talented and his creativity pushes me to move beyond the 3 section song structure and traditional 3 chord rock I usually play. Plus my daughter's band (Pink Marmalade) - basically the two of us writing songs - is getting me to integrate audio recording with loops and virtual synths to build up songs that are pretty complex for a 6th grader. We're collaborating on lyrics and I'm trying to keep the messages upbeat but she keeps pulling out ideas like the dystopian future that we're headed towards. I wish I had the energy or resolve to finish Wonderful's "Screaming in Braille" but since embarking on the Bad Samaritan sessions last fall, I'm torn between the simple alt rock and ballads of yesteryear and the more modern sounds of loop-based music production.

I expect by 2012 I'll be more focused and finally have a dozen songs I can share. Right now there's just bits and pieces loaded here and there.

A Bad Samaritan questions his choices

So is it better for me to use a free blog or to host my own website?
Should I stick with GoDaddy for domain registration or try someone new?
How the heck can I build a jukebox for streaming my music rather than storing raw MP3's that people can download?

The four competing factors are time, money, knowledge and energy. I'm willing to learn new skills and techniques, but have a limited amount of time and money, so that's what makes my deliberation over this site so important from the get-go.