Music Production, DJ, Live PA and Random Ramblings
Me, My Life and the Universe
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!
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!
Future of my blog (and how to make money plans…)
May 26th
So I thought I would speak about my intentions for this blog and how I intend to make some money off my passions, while exploiting current technology.
I haven’t spoken about it much on this site, but my absolute passion in life has become music and more specifically music creation, engineering and production. I absolutely love electronic music and my genres that I am interested in both from a production but also a live performance point of view are from the 125 bpm tech and electro house through to progressive house and then to the 140 bpm tech, progressive and uplifting trance with a massive dose of belting techno in the middle.
Between these genres they represent everything that appeals to me in sound and my own productions in some way, attempt to combine all my music interests into one track. One thing is massively prevelant in everything that I make and that is my love for percussion – african, latin and synthetic as well as my love for powerful, driving bass-lines that you might find in techno or tech-trance. There is just something so provocative about the rolling bass of a Simon Patterson track and the complex percussions loops of a Daniel Portman track. I love complex drum and percussion rhythms and the interplay with the bass-line always where my heart is at.
But back to what this post is actually about….I plan to completely redo this site using Joomla instead of WordPress and will put a custom theme together which I feel better defines me (well, I intent to pay on of my more UI talented colleagues to help me with it 
.
The reason for Joomla is because I intent to create a bit of a community and artist portal site for myself where I will not only provide my tunes as well as weekly/monthly podcasts of me mixing together my top tunes but I intent to use it as a platform to provide some pay-for content.
A big trend in the music production world over the last few years is for budding and mostly unsigned producers such as myself to release high-quality screen casts tutorials on things such as sound synthesis and design, sound engineering, mixing and production techniques, specific hardware or VST tutorials and even genre specific tutorials.
Most charge either a monthly fee to access all content (but then you need to be constantly delivering new content) or they work on a pay per course basis. Of course, the quality of the course is everything as well as the ability to leverage off the viral marketing potentials of the current interweb.
From all I have seen up till now, the sound and audio community is more than willing to pay for this (unlike the software dev community) and I, myself have forked out a good few hundred dollars for top quality content which has really helped me learn and grow in my abilities.
Now where I intent to diff slightly is that I plan to offer soundsets and sample packs for download. For example drum and percussion sample packs which I have designed from scratch. This is currently only being done by some of the top industry professionals and few can compete with the Vengeance sample pack series. Nonetheless I intent to try and initially I will give away a third of each pack for free to entice potential users.
For example say I have created a pack that contains Kicks, Snares, Claps, Open Hats, Closed Hats, Shakers, Congas and Bongos, then i will create a sample pack containing a third of each of the type of samples and distribute it on the various sites, forums etc etc.
This community is brutal, if my sample collections suck, they will flame me to death and obviously not buy. If they are good, there is the potential to gain not just the respect of the vast community but also to turn labels in your direction.
I would probably offer the full sample pack for $20-$30 and it might contain 300-500 one shot samples and maybe 100 loops created solely from the sample in the pack and various bits of processing that effecting.
For the tutorials, I will need to first determine what I want to create and how often I am able to get something out before deciding on a costing model. I will probably include the Ableton Live Packs for free (I use Ableton Live as my primary sequencing system) to registered users of the site, again to entice them to view the tutorials that produced the live packs.
I also intent to provide tutorials on my live performance setup once I have actually figured it out for myself and actually started performing live. My intention is not to be a DJ, but rather, an electronic musician commonly known as a Live PA. This differs to a DJ in two ways. Firstly, I will only play my own music. Secondly, like a band or musician, I will totally recreate the music live – if you have ever seen Goldfish, then you have an idea about what I am talking about…
Overall, this is not something that will make tons of money by any means, it is not something that will allow me to make music all day long. It could however, have a tremendous impact on community support which in turn leads to gigs (where the money is at if you are a DJ) and production/remix requests (not much money to be made any more here).
The current trend in the electronic music world is that your music gets you the gigs and the gigs get you the money and that is why, nowadays, every DJ is a producer and every producer is a DJ.
Anyways, should be an exciting year. My intention this year, musically, is to get my tracks to a level that I would be willing to submit them to labels. If I can do that, It would mean that it has taken me around 2.5 years to get to that level which is decent since most well known producers say that it took them 4-5 years to get their tracks to top level standard. Who knows, maybe I am being overly optimistic, I still have so much to learn but hey, that’s just me
Image of Love
Apr 8th
A few years ago, my wife and I went on this amazing weekend course called IMAGO, which means Image of Love. It was an intense and fascinating 2 day, 7am-7pm kind of thing which had a massive effect on us and our relationship.
IMAGO is an area of psychology which deals with our perception of what love means, as passed to us by our parents primarily but also influenced by our environment…the whole nature and nurture thing.
At the time, we were both about 24 years old and the youngest there by at least 15 years. If fact, most couples that were there were either divorced, separated or pretty close to it and so we did feel pretty uncomfortable initially because unlike everyone else, we were coming there very happy in our relationship, but looking for further ways to enhance our lives together. All of the other couples, seemed to be there as a last resort to somehow get that spark going again.
I’ll start with the results first, at the end of the weekend, all the couples that were separated and even divorced actually got back together. Nuff said!
So what makes the course so amazing and why would doing it bring you closer together? Well, it all has to do with your parents….Whether we like it or not, our perceptual image of love, money, sex, men, women, religion and other racial groups are heavily controlled by the way we were raised. Ever read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki? It’s the same idea but with reference to money and how the rich stay rich because of how they think about money and how the poor stay poor, as well, due to how they think about money.
Now the image that our parents give us about love and what it means in this world has an enormous bearing on not just the rest of our lives, but also every aspect of our lives. Much more so than anything else. Why? It’s because for the first 18-25 (or sometimes even longer) years of our life, our entire mental picture of what it means for two people to be in love is entirely contained by the way that our parents love or don’t love each other. Above this though, the way they act towards each other in terms of how they speak and behave and under which scenarios and contexts also shapes everything we think and believe about love.
Have you ever found it interesting that:
- The child who was beaten, often beats his own children.
- The person who always picks the bad boy/girl, continues to do so and never gets why they keep getting hurt.
- The child whose parents got divorced when they were young, has serious commitment issues as an adult.
- The child whose parents were known adulterers, often becomes one as an adult.
- The child whose parents were together forever, often has no trouble committing to one person for life.
Now if these examples seem stereotypical or even clichéd, then we need to ask ourselves, why are they stereotypical? Is there some truth to them that makes them so common in society? I know people from each of these example and the amazing thing is that every single one of them conforms to the cliché. It’s not really a hard mental step to grasp really, what you see as a child, you believe as an adult. Whether you believe it or not.
So how this specific IMAGO course tackles this is by making you confront each and every issue that you have with your parents in a manner of highly engaging role playing and powerful psychological tools. It forces you to bring up, acknowledge and discuss things from the trivial to the most serious. The role playing is difficult but powerful. To give you an example of how it works…At one point, my wife and I had to sit on the floor together facing each other, we had to look straight into each other’s eyes and remain that way for the entire duration of the exercise. We took turns being the others parent and in doing so we had to give answers to concerns around a specific issue that the “child” was asking.
The whole idea behind this is to firstly get answers for and then have closure on why something is as it was. If you think you have no issues with your parents, wait till you do this. Let me assure you that every person ends up in tears, it is very traumatic and very healing.
There are many different psychological exercises that you will do with your partner to unearth everything related to how love was represented to you by your parents.
Over the course of the weekend you begin to really, truly understands who your partner is and why they do what they do, from leaving their clothes on the floor to the need for a boys/girls night out to issues such as cheating, children and life.
The reason why those couples got back together at the end of everything is that for the first time in their lives, they understood each other and why they do things. In most cases as well, if one partner was continually doing something that was unintentionally sabotaging their relationship, they also realised, probably for the first time, what they were doing and why they were doing it. In realising all of that, they now know how to stop doing it.
This makes all the difference.
My Life Changing Book List
Mar 9th
If you have read this blog for any amount of time, you will have realised that I am someone who has been on a transformational journey for the last 5 years. This journey has led me out of the manic aggression, wrought with interesting episodes (which ultimately ended up in me hurting someone I didn’t know) into someone who is seeking enlightenment.
My journey has brought me to a place where I believe most will never reach due to their obsession with money, greed, fame, lust, desire for power and all the other symptoms of the ego.
I have had many helpers along the way and as I continue to grow to become a better, more caring, more genuine person I wanted to acknowledge those helpers who have played a cardinal role in what has become a life worth treasuring.
Now besides from my wife, who is obviously the most influential force and person I have ever had on my life and who, over the last 10 years, has made me into a man that I respect and love, I have some secondary influences in the form of pieces of literature.
Now you might be thinking, what can a book do to change your life, well, you need to read these books and then you will understand. These books will help you understand how poisonous you are to yourself. If you are not so obtuse and ignorant that you cannot look deep into yourself, then these books will change the rest of your life for the better. Without further ado my top 5:
1. A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle
This is the most life changing book I have ever read. This is the source of dissolving your ego. Your ego, which you may or may not realise is the everything and anything upon which your apparent life is created. It is why you say and do practically everything and you have no idea how much it has polluted your life.
It creates that niggling little voice which is making you insane, every second of every day (though you may not realise your insanity until it’s gone). Every conversation you have, every thought, every thing you do, is affected by your ego’s desire to attain more.
Those who think they have no ego, are some of the most egotistical people alive by virtue of the fact that they use their apparent higher plain of consciousness to perceive themselves as better than everyone else. This of course, is the ego. It is only we you can be truly non-judgemental that you will understand this fully.
One day, although I suspect it will take a lifetime, I hope to be non-judgemental and ego-less from a purely genuine place.
If you think you do not need to read this, then you are precisely the person who needs to read it. Everyone on earth needs to read this, simple.
Does the following mean anything to you:
When I do well, it is because of my intelligence, but when others do well, it is because of their environment.
When I do badly, it is because of my environment but when others do badly, it is because of their intelligence.
You know what your answer is to this, that is why you need to read this book.
2. The Power Of Now – Eckhart Tolle
This book is by the same author as above and although written first, I believe should be read after you have read and absorbed the first book. This book conveys another side to the ego that we all struggle with every single day and most importantly how you overcome it.
For most people, the future will always be better, brighter and greater. We will achieve all our goals in the future and we will be happy, fulfilled and successful in the future. On top of this, most feel defined by their past. Their past shapes their abilities, their reactions, their lifestyle and their ambitions.
The problem with this, is that if this is how you define you life, you will spend the rest of you life blaming the past and wishing for the believed to be better, but never attainable, future.
Again, this is the ego’s desire to be better and in the same way as described previously, it completely poisons you out of your own future. This book provides the same solution as the first one, because it is the only solution to the same underlying problem.
You need to understand that the message in both above books takes years to understand and digest and it is not something that you just read. It is something you need to live. But after merely reading, the transformation will have already begun. You will be staggered at how much happier you are and how much more comes into your life.
3. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Steven Covey
Possibly the most famous, “self-help” book in the world. The definition of effectiveness. An absolute master-class of how to create everything you want, practically.
7 life-long habits that will take you a life time to embrace. These habits make you believe that anything is possible and if you are naive like me, then you will certainly welcome this way of thinking. If you are a glass is half-empty kind of pessimist, then you need to read this in order to not spend a life wishing for what you can only blame yourself for not attaining.
4. Emotional Intelligence – Daniel Goleman
Emotional Intelligence has nothing to do with how well you handle pressure or stress at work or how nervous you get in a job interview. This is what MBA students are taught to understand it as, but that is not it.
EQ is related to everything spoken about already and it is all of the above. This book discusses both the physiological and psychological aspects of EQ and if you love science like me, then you will find the biological aspects of the brain and mind discussed in this book, incredibly interesting.
This is the authoritative work on the subject by the man who first understood it and while it is a challenging read, you will feel incredibly awakened by the notions of how pointless and meaningless things like IQ really are. If you love the fact that you are clever and all you think of is shallow financial success, then you need to read this because you need to understand that clever has nothing to do with getting you the materialistic props that you seek so badly.
5. Gut Feelings – Gerd Gigerenzer
Superb. If you want to trust every decision you ever make and know that it comes from a place of depth so far beyond what the primitive, conscious, logical mind can fathom, then you need to read this. I think we all know, intuitively that all the best decisions, that we all make, are not those that come to use by way of logic and deep analytical thinking.
I have tried to live my life avoiding logical thinking for as long as I can remember and I have always made the right decisions for better or for worse. Note, that your gut may not always lead you along the path of least resistance. It may not even lead you on a pleasurable journey, but, it will lead you where you need to go, because there is a message and life-lesson for you in that journey.
This book is fascinating in that the author actually shows you how, though a multitude of verbal and thought experiments, just how powerful and correct your intuition is. It is staggering and provoking. It will make you understand that life is not as serious as we all wish it to be. Life is as fun as we make it and life is everything that we think it is. If you think it is bad, it will be bad.
So how have these 5 books (amongst many others) changed me? Well, everyday I am living the life I want, I am happy, I have all sorts of amazing opportunities coming to me, money always seems to make itself available to me when I need it and most importantly, I have a soul mate to share it all with.
Couldn’t ask for anything better really!
