Doron Dusheiko
Music Production, DJ, Live PA and Random Ramblings
Tutorial Plan
Aug 17th
Right so I am busy planning out the various tutorials that I am going to offer on this site. Well, not entirely but at least the first few 
My idea is to offer two types:
- Screen cast style where by I will describe the subject through an interactive video. This will usually involve me providing theoretical foundations for the concept and then performing demonstrations which can be followed and replicated. Any associated files, projects, documents and the like will be included with the tutorial as a download.
- Written tutorials comprising screen shots and textual descriptions. These will be used where concepts are of a purely theoretical nature such as when discussing a concept from music theory or perhaps some kind of sound analysis.
As a first pass design at the various curricula, I want to do the following two courses:
Production Technology
Compressors
- What, Why, When
- How – Threshold
- How – Ratio
- How – Attack
- How – Release
- Where – Drums
- Where – Percussion
- Where – Bass
- Where – Leads
- Specific Applications – Sidechain Compression
- Specific Applications – New York/Parallel Compression
Music Production and Sound Design
Drums and Percussion
- Theory – What is the rhythm section of a track
- Practice – Designing a Kick
- Practice – Designing a Snare
- Practice – Designing a Clap
- Practice – Designing a Open and Closed Hi Hat
- Practice – Designing a Shaker
- Practice – Designing a Wood Block
- Practice – Sampling
- Practice – Sequencing
- Practice – Processing and Effects
All of the above are going to be screen casts and I will probably refine this list many more times because I think it’s quite week and doesnt provide a thorough (enough) overview of concepts and practices.
Nonetheless it’s a start and if this list is anything to go by, then perhaps 2 years from now, I will have hundreds of tutorials on this site. Provided I can ensure that the quality is of the highest level, I plan to completely outdo anything else that is available on the internet.
I have also been toying with the idea of giving it all away for free, both the tutorials and my own music. I know you probably think I am nuts but there is method in this madness that I will go into on another post. For the time being, let me just say that my plan is not to make money from the music on its own because in this internet age, that money would almost be negligible. It’s simply not a viable option anymore. Instead, the plan is to use my music and tutorials to get myself exposure and ultimately gigs as a DJ and performing artist because that is where the money is at.
After watching the industry for a number of years, I have observed the following:
- Artist X is a bedroom DJ and producer.
- Artist X makes tons of tracks, send them to labels for a few years and gets shot down time and again.
- Artist X starts DJ’ing at a local pub/club to get experience and tiny bits of exposure.
- Artist X eventually makes a track that a small label is willing to sign.
- This track then ends up on Beatport and Trackitdown which is where the artist’s name starts to grow a little bit.
- X releases a few more tracks but now he has developed some industry clout and a big label signs him up.
- X then releases his track on the big label and then his name really blows up.
- The big label usually handles his marketing and acts as management agent controlling his DJ bookings and requests which now start to come in thick and fast from all over the world.
- X now has made it.
Now I know I am making this process sound quite mechanical but honestly I have watched it happen with small names turning into big names countless times and the process always seems to work like this. Also on reading many interviews with famous DJ/producers, they pretty much all say the same thing.
Now my intention is to kind of bypass some of this because it is both a slow process and I am getting into the game pretty late….Note I didn’t come up with this strategy, I am basically copying this guy, Tom Cosm, who pretty much releases everything for free and through providing high quality content and proving his worth, he is currently touring Europe for 4 months playing gigs all over the continent despite not being affiliated with any label or studio whatsoever. His whole reputation has been built up by making good music (firstly!) and then providing good content to the whole community. The only thing he sells are HD versions of his tutorials that can be purchased and shipped on a DVD (I have bought all of them), but you can still download standard quality versions as well as all his music, directly off his site, for free.
So in short, my plan is to give it all away and build up a solid reputation around my personal brand. Using this approach of not waiting for a record label to bite means I can distribute my music at my will and get (potentially) millions of people listening through the power of viral and social media marketing.
It’s a plan that is certainly full of holes and naivety but that’s exactly why I like it
RSS feed
Aug 15th
In messing with everything in the site, I realised that for some or other reason the RSS feed is spewing out posts that I wrote a long time ago, near the top of the list. So feel free to re-read my entry from sometime in the beginning of 2008 entitled: Programmers and Chakras.
The interesting thing about the RSS feed having a mind of its own is that I got to read that post again for the first time in a few years….It’s quite fascinating reading something you wrote in the past. I think what I should do is write a few follow ups to some of the contentious ones and see if my viewpoints have changed and in what ways. If nothing else, it will be interesting to evaluate my thoughts over time and make some comparisons as well as ponder the influences.
Anyways, the RSS feed is now configured to show all posts so if all of a sudden you see a whole lot that you hadn’t seen before, enjoy!
WordPress Hacks
Aug 15th
I am busy going through the pains of re-designing my site to be more appropriate for future plans and in doing so I was initially struck by the idea that I should change CMS to something like Joomla or Drupal. I actually gave it a bash for a few hours….I set it all up, tweaked a few things, tried to get everything just right and then realized that I hate Joomla and it’s rubbish! Now by rubbish I don’t mean it’s crap…it’s a darn good CMS, it’s just rubbish for my intentions.
I also gave one of the new competitors, Concrete5 , a bash which on first impression, seemed pretty good. It had all the plugins you would need to satisfy current social media integration within your blog and seems aimed at designers, which implied that it should be simple to use and capable of crafting impressive UI’s. It’s actually a bit old school in the sense that one drags components around the screen to place everything but it was precisely this technology which I don’t like. I don’t like “designing” each page in isolation. I like to spend hours and hours configuring post or page categories and then use clever tools which derive menu’s from the category hierarchies and then apply page bling across the whole thing.
To cut a long story short, WordPress has it’s quirks but I am used to it and as of 2009, it actually beat Joomla for the top spot in the Open Source CMS awards, so not only is WordPress being considered more than just blogging software but it’s actually considered the best CMS software at this moment and I fully concur with this.
Back to the tips and tricks…
In WordPress you can only have a single dynamic page of posts. You can create static pages for things like “About” and “Contact” but you can’t actually post to them. This posed a problem for me because I am trying to use WordPress as a CMS with a complex and hierarchal menu structure comprising dynamic pages which contain posts pertaining to those sections. The answer lay in post categories and the particular theme I am using. What I did was first replicate the menu structure I wanted as post categories, including any hierarchies. This is one of the great things about WordPress.
Then once those were set, one can setup the menu using the provided menu editor for this particular theme. The cool thing about this custom menu is that you can point the items at pages, categories or custom links.
The resulting menu looks like this:
So at this point, we have a set of custom post categories defining how we want our content to be structured and a menu structure linked to both the categories and some static pages. The purpose of this exercise is so that when we create a new post and specify that it is in category x and y, then WordPress will add the post to menu item x and y and effectively dynamically generate different pages for us based on the the category of the post.
Post Categories
The use of the categories will also allow us to use the category sidebar widget to inform the user of both the nature of the posts but also to provide a post count and rss feed per category.
The menu item that matches the post category will now contain posts within that category such as the example below which contains a single post in the “Fun and Humour” category.
Hope it helps your WordPress en devours
Well not quite
Jul 24th
It’s interesting what is and what isn’t, what could and what couldn’t, what should and what shouldn’t. What friends are friendly about and what they aren’t. Where the conversation goes and where it shouldn’t. What we should do and what we shouldn’t. What we need to do yet can’t.
It’s very interesting because we are all very interesting, full of our own agendas and mind games which seem to hurt us when they backfire and deflate our sense of self.
Not that we know how to change nor desire to. If we did, what would there be without all the mind games, strategies and innuendos. Well, maybe not much. Would it be more whole though, more complete or would the desire to win come through regardless.
Can we win without aiming to win? Can we fight without ever fighting? Should we bother trying?
Why am I talking about this and why does it matter to me? Well, for no other reason than it does.
Why does home ground advantage mean so much? How does this affect our mindset? Its the same field isn’t it?
What is this post about, is there a point? I have absolutely no idea. Is there a point in this for you? Does something resonate with you?
Is the downer worth the upper? Is my upper, your downer and vice versa?
Would life be simpler if these questions didn’t matter at all to me? Probably….
Is there ever truly a right way or a wrong way? Surely it’s all relative?
Is the colour that you were told to recognise as red, the same as the colour that I was told to recognise as red? Couldn’t we ever know?
Is there something that matters more than the people we share the moments with? Are the people more important than the moments? If you took the people away, would the moment still exist? Would you want it to exist if you were experiencing it on your own?
Are you a tourist or a traveller? Is there a difference for you?
How did I learn to read and write and do basic maths? I can’t really figure it out yet I seem to be able to do it.
If we only aim for things we understand, will we ever achieve anything? Doesn’t stepping outside of your boundaries require you to master things you don’t understand or so you already understand them and need them to be brought to the surface?
How does something move from short term to long term memory?
What happens when we are gone? Are we still omnipresent? I believe so…
Is this post getting longer than it needs to be? Define how long something is. Define how long a piece of string is. Is it as long as this post?
If people don’t consider these questions, are they stupid? If people do consider these questions, are they stupid?
Stupid is relative isn’t it?
I guess I must be stupid.
I miss you, mom
Jul 15th
This post has been coming for a while, a few years to be precise.
On the 25th of this month, it will be 3 years ago that my mom passed away. She died due to complications related to colon cancer. Despite my overwhelming positivity in most aspects of life, I feel that it is probably time that I speak about this and the effect that it has had on me. This post will be long and if you are squemish, you probably shouldn’t read.
It’s not easy watching someone disappear from your life. My mom was a great woman. Loud, passionate and incredibly loving. She sacrificed so much in her life for my sisiter and I and I will always be incredibly grateful for everything she did to allow my sister and I to succeed.
My mom grew up in a tiny town called Jan Kempdorp outside of Kimberly in South Africa (which itself is a pretty small town). How the hell a family of Jews ended up there I will never know.
My mom had a difficult upbringing as one might expect, being a Jew in a small South African town. Antisemitism was rife and money was almost non-existent. Despite this though, my mom did well at school and her life long dream was to go to Uganda to live and work with the their gorilla population, sadly though, this dream was never to materialize.
It is hence not a surprise that as an adult, I am extremely passionate about animal welfare and am a member of a variety of welfare groups. In fact this weekend, I will be participating in a Peta protest against the use of animal skins in clothing where I will be covered in “blood” and will taunt people at the side of the road as they drive past – something I love doing because in general, I can’t stand people.
My mom was never able to attend a university but I was so happy that 2 months before her death I was able to give possibly the greatest moment of her life, which was my university graduation. I don’t think I have ever seen a bigger smile on her face, even bigger than my Bar Mitzvah.
One of the many lowest points that occur in seeing my mom pass away and something that still haunts me 3 years later is the last conversation I had with her before she fell into a coma. It was not the content of the conversation but rather that we had a bit of a argument. It was nothing serious, but we had an scuffle over something trivial while she was in the hospital and I kind of walked away in a huff.
The next day, my dad called me to say that my mom was in a coma. Two weeks later she was dead. I never got to say goodbye or how much I loved her. That moment haunts me.
Over the next two weeks, while her lifeless body was in the ICU, we all were around her, we spoke to her, we spoke about life, we did out best to put off the inevitable.
I knew that my mom was holding on till we told her it was okay for her to pass, I could feel it and sense it. On the 25th of July at 12:15 in the ICU at Linksfield clinic, I asked my family if I could have a moment with her. I told her how much I loved her and I thanked her for everything she had done for me. At the end, I kissed her incredibly bloated face and I whispered in her ear “Go and be at peace”. I turned around and walked towards the door of the ICU. As I was about to walk out of the door, her heart stopped and the infamous flat line sound was made by the hospital machinery.
It was over.
My dad and I hugged for the first time in my life and he cried which was something I have never seen before. I told him it would be ok. They were married for 27 years and my mom passed away at the age of 62.
The last 10 years of my mom’s life were not happy at all. Prior to her having colon cancer, she also had breast cancer which led to her having a mastectomy. She also had around 10 major 8 hour back surgeries which included things such as a spinal fusion on multiple occasions. At the time of her death, she couldn’t really walk anymore and was in constant pain.
Yet despite this, she always showed tremendous positivity and courage and even went to work right up until 3 weeks before her death. She was a file administrator for the same family of companies for the best part of 30 years. That courage, positivity, loyalty and strong will is something I am proud to carry with me today as part of her legacy. She was a great woman and the life and soul of our family. My sister and I sound so similar to her, especially our enormous laugh.
I miss her so much and it has been difficult for me to come to terms with seeing a new women in my dad’s bed where my mom used to sleep, especially given that it only took him 4 months to move on and is now unhappy (although he has yet to admit as much to me). Our relationship has been strained but I want him to be happy. He is still healthy in body and mind and has many years to live. I want them to be happy years.
This month is always hard for me and closer to the 25th I will become snappier and a bit nasty to those around me but it is never intentional.
Anyways, I am glad I finally had the courage to post this.
I love you mom!
