Welcome to Issue 8!
It’s been six months since I released the first music track from the Signal Source Unknown music project.
At that point I had no followers or listeners on any of the music streaming services and not much of a clue about how to find an audience on-line or anywhere else!
This feeling of cluelessness continues now that I have this newsletter.
Why would anyone read this apart from me and my imaginary cat?
Well, I do hope to bring something of value to the table.
Perhaps you are undertaking your own creative project and are trying to make more sense of it by writing it down somewhere.
Apparently, writing things down helps empty out those thoughts from your mind to give it more room to do more important things like making you feel a bit better about your creative projects that aren’t going anywhere!
I’m sure writing things down helps me and so I surround myself with a protective wall of notebooks and pens. They are filled with scratchy notes and lists, silly poems that don’t really rhyme, doodles, coffee-rings, diagrams and more.
Sometimes this leads me down the wrong path.
Like many others I’d found myself spending a lot of time at home during 2020 and 2021 and once I’d cleaned out the attic and reorganised the weeds and put my books into size order a few times I started to hanker for a project to do.
Something to keep me occupied that didn't involve going too far (frowned upon at that point) and with one golden, unbreakable rule. No computers!
As someone who had spent a lot of time playing drums in bands and trying to record music at home I knew just the thing - sketching!
And it was an excuse to get more stationary.
I ordered a stack of sketch books online and all sorts of pens and pencils and books about how to sketch as I was sure that was all essential equipment.
I spent several weeks and months sketching a lot of different things to various bemused looks and stifled laughter. I gradually ‘progressed’ to using watercolours and pen but these were about as good as it got …
DRY STONE DYKE WITH GATE
SOMETHING IN A BOWL?
I began to realise that I needed to be half decent at these kind of things or my enthusiasm would dip.
Shallow, I know.
I began to think about music.
I couldn’t fit an Abbey Road type set up in my shed. I didn’t have room for a live room, studio desk, microphones, drum-kit, electric guitar, piano, huge speakers or much else really.
Then I remembered my golden rule, broke it and switched on my computer.
Right then, where do I plug in the guitar?
A great read, E, and I love your sketches! A 'protective wall of notebooks and pens' sounds extremely familiar - I have a similar scenario around my own life!