Even before the pandemic, I was considered the tech and fixit guy in my house. Which is not a good sign. I do know how to fix things, sort of, but in a "look,you can do this thing with corrugated cardboard and packing tape" kind of way. What few shop skills I have are limited to what you can do with hand tools because, ironically, my grandfather spent some time during the Depression working in the family's industrial woodworking factory. He saw someone lose their fingers, and so it was a big deal when my father actually starting using a power drill around the house. He made it clear that was as crazy as things were ever going to get, and so it was. To this day, my fabrication and repair skills are based on the level of danger afforded the oldest group of kids at a day camp, and no more.
Meanwhile, I played music for over twenty years before I even tried to get good at recording myself. I told myself I didn't have the slightest idea how to do it: knowing where to place a microphone or how to use an EQ seemed like voodoo to me. But somewhere along the way, it became slightly less impossible to get a half-decent sound into a computer, and the more time I spent doinking around with recording software, plugins and the like, the more I became the guy in the house who knew how to back up files, how to install an update, how to force quit a stubborn app, and how to make things like photos and video and audio files behave, more or less.
Which, for the moment, makes me an expert, until the digital natives growing up under my roof start rolling their eyes, taking over because it's faster to just do it for me than to explain to the old man one more time how the radio works in the flying car. Only I didn't feel particularly expert this past week, because all the tech at my studio went blotto on me, or at least the most important part right now, viz., the setup allowing me to do high-resolution streaming to Youtube and Facebook. After several days, and a great deal of extremely generous troubleshooting help from a few friends and acquaintances, things were looking up enough switch gears, at least for a few hours, and so I spent this morning putting up shelves in my daughter's bedroom closet. With a screwdriver, of course, a rip saw, and a modest spot of power drilling. The result were at least tangible, which is more than I can say for all the digital rabbit holes I've been down lately.
Speaking of which, in the midst of all the chaos, I decided it would be a wise use of my time to reorganize my Spotify files. While this was about as smart as re-alphabetizing one's LPs during finals week, in doing so I did turn up a number of cool albums I'd been meaning to listen to more closely. Since there won't be a new Youtube lesson this week, I've made a playlist of some new and old favorites I came across the past couple of days. You can find it on the Playlists page of my web site:
Music To Listen ToMore soon,
David
