You see, after I lost damn near everything I had to sit down and think about how I would recover. Being the engineer type I considered it an exercise in requirements gathering. What did I lose that was essential? How quickly did I want to have certain capabilities back? What would my new information architecture look like? I actually sketched all this out on a notepad that I kept updating and tweaking over the course of a couple days. (I should note that a home server with a RAID-5 array was part of the solution.)

Also right around the time my disk self-destructed I had my Pacemaker arrive. With serial number five (yep, #0005) you can probably tell I was pretty interested in this thing. And I certainly was. Ironically this post started out before my disk crashed as a post about what a fantastically cool device it was. I mean, sure it was $750 bucks, but still, pretty cool. There was definitely a learning curve involved with this device and it takes a fair bit of skill but I was confident that with some time I’d have it down.

But while I was spec’ing out my “brave new world” of computing something happened. I realized that DJing itself wasn’t really what I liked. What I liked was live performance with sampling. At that moment everything kind of snapped into place and I realized the reason I was constantly fighting with the ideas behind what “DJing” meant to me was I actually wasn’t trying to really DJ in the true sense of it and in fact didn’t want to DJ. I wanted to produce! It might sound funny or odd that it took me this long to realize that simple fact, but there you have it.

I still want to perform live in the future, it would just be a different kind of show. Truth be told, one of the great things about using Ableton Live as your main DAW is that you can perform out in a way that’s strikingly similar to how you produce in the studio. That’s one of the things I love about it and I definitely want to try and keep my workflow as loose and creative as possible to encourage that mindset.

So as I rebuilt my main audio workstation I kept all this in mind and streamlined my processes and even my gear setup. I returned the Pacemaker (somewhat sadly I must admit) and decided that the money I would have spent on it would be better suited to saving up for a new keyboard or possibly a guitar. I have to say now that I’ve done all this I am feeling less burdened and more creative. It’s funny how a change in mindset can affect so much.

I’ll have something cool for people to listen to here by the end of the weekend hopefully!

But this stupid subwoofer issue is really irritating. If I don’t get this fixed soon (M-Audio is still slacking on sending the schematics) I’m probably just going to have to go out and buy a different sub. I know it’s stupid to let this bother me that much, but for whatever reason it does. I guess I just got really used to having that supportive low end in my music. And I’m a perfectionist when it comes to my craft and that means having my setup as perfect as possible too.

Soon though it will be taken care of and I can go back to making aural magic. Some days I feel like I’m near to some kind of breakthrough and that I will really be able to make all the pieces in my setup work in unison. It just takes time and effort though more than anything else.

Effort I don’t mind one bit. Time is another story unfortunately. Work is so out of control at the moment that what free time I have usually has to go to the other necessities of life. I’m lucky if I get 4 hours a week to work on music and that really doesn’t cut it.