Tennis season is ongoing right now and I am having a terrible spring season. I have basically forgotten or lost the ability to hit a forehand. I am not sure what it is but my shots this spring literally are hitting the back fence. I consider myself to be a pretty decent tennis player. My back hand, volleys and service are doing pretty well, but I just cannot hit a forehand at all. 

The whole mechanic of the swing feels "off" and I am afraid I am actually developing bad muscle memory at this point. A good forehand has this satisfying connection with the ball that you just know feels good when you hit it. The ball has topspin and momentum. Whenever I hit the ball right now though my whole body positioning and contact with the ball feels awful and either end up hitting the ball into the ground or into the back fence. It is quite frankly embarrassing. 

Megan was kind enough to go out to the court and hit with me this past Friday and I thought that I had found my stroke again. I had two matches to play this Saturday due to the weather this past spring. My first matching in the morning was a solid win. Not my best game ever, but I had my confidence back. When I got to my second match in the afternoon though, things fell apart. I quickly devolved from being able to it a solid shot to not being able to hit a forehand at all and I quickly lost the second set 1-6. 

So I think I need to do a radical change on my tennis store before I settle too far into this pit that I am defending into. I feel like my mechanics are already "damaged" with my one handed forehand so I am going to start practicing a two handed forehand. My backhand, even before this ordeal has always been my better groundstroke. The two handed action forces my body into a more proper position. I can't swing as easily with an open body, etc. 

I feel that a two handed forehand will help me shorten my swing, but also force me to swing through my stroke rather than swing "up" on my stroke, which I think is what I am doing right now. It will be an experiment over the next week or two, but I hope it can help me get my game back on track. 

reading the details online it seems that the 2HFH has the opinion of many has having consistency, something which is my most needed item at this moment. 

Over the past fifteen years or so I have made music in all sorts of forms. It is hard to believe that I have been "making" electronic music for fifteen years now and in that time I have seen the stupendous rise of music making software come and go. I have also seen the barrier of entry for new musicians become better and better every year. There truly has never been a better time than now to be a person who wants to make music. The tools are affordable and cheap. 

Perhaps it is the grizzled veteran in me now, but I do find a bit if exhaustion when browsing online communities and reading the posts from people who are just getting started. I am sure to some degree I was just as annoying as some of the people I find online now, but I have this weird sense that the new music makers have a paranoia or perhaps fear of really diving into the music creation process on their own and just figuring it out.  Nothing makes me cringe more than when I read a post that has someone asking "how do I make this sound from XXXX song". Man, just dig in there and figure it out, or make your own sound. 

It made me think about the common discussions I have with people online and I decided I would summarize them into a cheesy buzzfeed style top ten list. So here are my top ten tips for all the new artists out there who are getting started (and those who aren't). 

1. Make your own music. 

The #1 thing I would say to everyone out there is you gotta make your own music. Stop worrying about trying to making a sound in a genre or like another artist who has made it. If you ask yourself what makes the biggest and most well know acts in the world who they are, I think the answer is that they have a definitive sound. One can almost instantaneously recognize a Daft Punk or Chemical Brothers or Orbital song as soon as it begins playing and that is because they have developed their own sound. As an artist you can certainly try to copy a song and then when you fail to do so, make it your own and make it something wholly yours. 

2. Learn on hardware if you can. It isn't more expensive and ditch the PC.

Hardware has never been cheaper and old hardware has never been better. I know this won't be the popular opinion, but go out there and buy a couple of groove boxes and start making music on those first. The entire Volca series can be purchased for under $500. Old electribes can be had for about $100 a piece. Old MC series groove boxes can be bought for under $200 and the mother of groovebox workstations, the EMU Command Stations can readily be had for around $250. 

Hardware is just simply going to make it easier to learn the basics of synthesis in my opinion. Signal paths are clearly laid out and the hands on nature I think just connects with the brain in a much better way. If you move on from hardware or move on up, it has a resale value as well that software just doesn't. Buy some groove boxes and disconnect yourself from the distractions of the PC when writing your music. To this day my favorite synth to work with is my simplest one.

3. Don't be afraid to use old equipment or software.

The newest DAW's that are out on the market are amazing. Some of the features that they have truly are impressive, but with that list of features comes complexity. These workstations have years, sometimes decades of history behind them and in many cases the users have decades of history growing with these workstations. There is nothing to be ashamed of if you choose to use an older piece of software. With luck you can hopefully find a license key that is fairly cheap used on eBay or craigslist or something like that. Chances are that that piece of software, even as far back as ten years or so can make all the music you want it to, especially if you are in the Windows world where backwards comparability seems almost indefinite.  

This also goes for hardware and almost doesn't need to be said based on my #2 post above. The gear still works and it still can create amazing sounds. 

4. Learn that you may not be good at making the music you like to listen to.

I love dance music, especially trance. For years I spent a lot of time and effort trying to make it and it took me years to figure out that I am just not good at making it. Sure, I have had a couple of nice pieces here and there, but my strengths lie in other styles and genres. Take your shot at making your favorite genre, but don't be put off at creating music just because you aren't good at your favorite genre. Hell, you may find you aren't even good at making electronic music in general, but come to embrace what you are good at. It could be something as off the wall as sound design, film scoring, country/folk music, or simply creating patches for synths. You are still creating. 

5. Put in the time.

I am a huge culprit here myself. To get good you have to put in the time. Almost no one sits down and writes music brilliantly right away. If you are younger than 20 then you probably have more time to write than you realize. Making music is just as involved as learning an instrument. You may not realize it, but that three hours a day you are spending on learning Tracktion or that synth is worth it and counts as if you were practicing an instrument. What you put in you will get out, but don't expect to sit down for an hour a week to get it right. Hopefully though those three hours you spend every night after work or school is a lot more enjoyable than learning to play rudiments on a piano or guitar. 

6. Read the manual

I get it. You want to fiddle your way through your gear. I do that too, but manuals are mostly really good these days and for the ones that aren't there is usually someone on a community somewhere that has written a better one. And I am saying here to actually read the manual, not watch a YouTube video. Don't bounce back and forth between the DAW or hardware and the video to noodle around. Just sit-down and read it like a book in a quiet corner. Trust me on this, you will retain a lot more of it. The manual for my Command Station was over 200 pages and I read it cover to cover and I know that instrument better than any of my others. 

7. Compression is like makeup, if you notice it you've used too much.

I love this quote and I can't remember where exactly I heard it. Compression is the the Photoshop to today's modern music. It is an incredibly powerful tool and can do a lot of good. It can though very quickly do a lot of bad and too often I think musicians of all genres of music latch onto compression when writing their music. Sidechain compression is cool and a bit of a trope in modern EDM, but it has it's place, but I would actually go so far to say that you can ignore compression almost entirely when creating your music. It will help you to learn how to to get instruments and sounds to sit better together with each other. I learned this as I transitioned from software to hardware. I don't have compression on each track, but I do have EQ, filters and my sound design capabilities to get sounds to sit together nicely. That takes me right to my next point. 

8. Artists don't have to be mastering engineers.

For some reason electronic artists feel the need to also do audio mastering on their tracks. That is great if you can do it, but no other genre expects that from their artists and to be honest, I would rather have someone spending their time making more tracks than trying to perfectly master an existing track. Mastering is a whole different world and the tools are largely very different than would someone would normally use for mixing and recording. Forget about mastering your track. Mix it and normalize it and be done with it. If you have proper EQ and levels on it, someone can just turn the volume up on their listening device if they need it louder. If you think your track is that good, then pay to have it mastered. It is very cheap these days. If your track gets signed for some reason, congratulations, chances are the labels will want an unmastered copy so they can master it themselves. 

9. Don't be concerned with what is "Professional".

This covers a whole gamut of ideas from the way you physically look to the way your music sounds to the tools you use. Don't choose to use Ableton Live because everyone does and they claim it is more professional. Use the tools you want to use. If they achieve the sounds you want, then the conversation is over. At the end of the day the only thing you really should be concerned with is what gets you to make more music and what works with your workflow. If that happens to be Ableton Live, then great, but if it happens to be a Roland MC-303, then don't let anyone tell you that it sucks. 

10. Ask yourself who you are making the music for. 

There is no right or wrong answer to this one, but I think it is important for all musicians. Everyone has different end goals for this creative process. Some want to make a profession out of it, some want to use it has a hobby. Some may use it as an escape, while others may use it as a release. Whether you put all of your music on on the net for free, or you sell it, or you don't release a single piece of music publicly, don't let anyone tell you there is a wrong or right way to making music. 

One thing I have come to realize over the years is I hate communities who focus on providing critique of other user's music. I understand from a technical perspective how people want advice, and that is valuable, but too often opinions of music boil down to personal preference on what was created. How anyone can critique another creative endeavour boggles my mind. Most people have no idea what the personal story behind a song may be. The fact that someone were to tear it down or make claims that it may not be commercially viable misses the point, unless the song is specifically written for that target. 

Just write your music and get the feedback if you want it, but don't be consumed on getting feedback for your work. Those communities are an echo chamber and it is just musicians listening to other musicians. Don't let it be the end all be all to your music end goals. 

In an effort to expand my music creation palette and also get some more videos online, I am going to be experimenting with Sunvox. Sunvox is an modular tracker environment for music creation. It is a neat little free program that I think people should check out. It has some quirks to it, but ultimately has a cool interface. My first attempt at the video capture was a bit shaky. The stream quality for some reason is low, but I hope to get some better footage here in the future. 

I need to add some commentary in the future recordings to show my learning process with the software. The keyboard shortcuts here are taking quite a bit of getting used to and some of the layout of Sunvox is a bit clunky on OS X since this is a sort of universal program. 

Winter at work is always our slow time and it is a nice opportunity to us to catch up on smaller projects and plan things for the year. Spring is what brings in our busy time of the year and this year it has hit us suddenly like a brick. Things have been crazy busy and stressful. I have really found two outlets over the past couple of weeks to really burn off some steam. 

I have had a really energizing experience broadcasting some of my music in the studio on Twitch. I am now to the point where I am experimenting with two cameras and perhaps will expand to even three cameras. I hope over the coming weeks with this setup to do a couple of "live performance shows" or to do some tutorials for the Command Station and my other gear. 

The past couple of trips that I have taken have been to major metropolitan areas. New Orleans, Sand Diego, New York, etc. I have found that my iPhone has been invaluable in these areas when trying to find my way around the cities and finding things to do. Here is a list of my favorite travel apps (for the city)

Transit

I put this one first because I think it is the least well known of the bunch. Transit is a must if you are in a city where you will be using public transit. Open it up and you can instantly see all of the public transit options around you. What is really nice is that you can set your destination on the map and it will automatically calculate your public transit options for you. It also has real-time updates of routes for those cities that make that data available. 

Foursquare

The split of Foursquare last year was a tough one, but to be honest I have found it to probably be good for the company in the way the apps are used. The new Foursquare is a way to find things around you and is more than just for restaurants, but that is where it excels. I like it over Yelp, because it categorizes restaurants and locations using a crowd sourced tagging system, which I think is very efficient. It is super easy to pop the app open and see what are the best tags at a place for food, etc. 

Swarm

Swarm is the other off shoot app that came from the Foursquare separation. I not longer find it quite as useful, but checking in is still a fun process, especially if you are separated from other people on your trip, it makes for a fun way to keep track of where someone has been throughout the day. I still miss my favorite app of all time, Gowalla so let's hope Swarm can take some of those old Gowalla ideas, like the geocaching aspect and make the game more fun. 

Foodspotting

Foodspotting is a great app that should get more attention. It has a bit of overlap with Foursquare in its purpose, but it's strengths lie in its reliance on photos. Instead of just reading about what is good at a restaurant, instead see what other people have taken pictures of and read how they liked it. It is a sort of app that if you are really into food, then it is a must have. 

Evernote

Not much I can say about this one, that I haven't already said. I store a lot of info in here and for vacation planning it is ideal for throwing all of your receipts, digital tickets, event lists, to dos and other stuff for your vacation in here. I even throw in .PDf files of maps or brochures which I can easily bring up on a moment's notice.  

This past week I had an opportunity to goto New Orleans. Megan was having her annual art educator's conference there and I tagged along like I usually do. I never really had a desire to go to New Orleans before. I always sort of imagined it as a  sort of drunken college town (and it is that)  but I was pleasantly surprised after my weekend there. I was able to genuinely find some great music, great food and some great history. 

Day 1 - Thursday

We flew in to the city Thursday afternoon. We checked into our hotel which was located in the rehabilitated Warehouse district and then went out and got our bearings of the city. Our hotel was the Renaissance Arts Hotel which Megan thought was cool because it had a Chihuly sculpture in the lobby. Food was foremost on our minds though and we got some fantastic Happy Hour drinks and food at the Swizzle Stick Bar and had some gumbo and turtle soup. We then made our way to the downtown area and had some beignets a Cafe du Monde and checked out our first glimpse at the French Quarter. 

The night wrapped up with us taking a stroll through Bourbon Street late that night to see what it was. It was pretty much exactly what I thought it was. Expensive bars with crappy cover bands. We saw strip clubs and twenty or so drunken people standing in the street laughing at people who walked through horse manure. We decided pretty quickly that we had our fill. 

Day 2 - Friday

Day 2 had me heading out to a bayou kayaking tour. It is amazing how much of the area around New Orleans is really just swamp and bayou. There are almost no suburbs in the way that we think of them and everything is basically just under water. The kayak tour was a lot of fun. 

I was able to get some good tips for checking out some places in the area from our guides. I ended up going to Mother's Restaurant for lunch and had a huge po' boy sandwich and mustard greens. I had a chance to head back down to the square to to get some photos and found a bunch of street performers out and about.  I then attempted to see some of the old cemeteries, but the main one in the city just outside of the French Quarter unfortunately required you to go with a tour and it closed at 3:00 PM, so I was out of luck on that. Megan and I met back up and we had dinner at a place called Cochon. It was good, but honestly it reminded me a lot of a Chicago restaurant like Carriage House or something. 

We then decided to spend an hour over at the Harrah's casino which seemed to dominate the downtown area. I put in $2 in the slot machine and ended up with $8, which Megan then quickly made disappear. 

Day 3 - Saturday

Saturday was a really fun day. I started out at the World War II Museum, which was quite impressive. If anyone has a chance to go see it do so. There is a really great interactive movie there that features Tom Hanks that is very immersive. The museum is really well made and features a really heartbreaking but also partially romantic look back at the war. I thought they did a particularly good job at covering the Pacific front of the war which all too often seems to be overlooked. 

I then left the museum and headed out on the trolly to finally get to see the cemeteries. This time I went to the Greenwood Cemetery to the north. It was an interesting place and it was neat to see the gravestones dating back to the 1800's. From there I met back up with Megan and we grabbed a bite to eat and killed some time in the afternoon before making our way over to Frenchman's street for the evening. Now if you want to see some local music that isn't cover bands it seems that Frenchman's Street is the place to be. We got luck and found a seat at the bar of a place called 3 Muses. They had an amazing jazz ensemble with a clarinetist, accordion player, guitarist and upright bass player. We spent our evening there and had a wonderful time. It really was the perfect way to close out New Orleans. 

This past Christmas Megan bought me the Hyrule Historia for the Legend of Zelda series. LOZ has always been one of my favorite games series, but I am ashamed to say that I haven't played through all of the games in the series. While reading through the historia I found that there is now a timeline to the LOZ series. It happened at that same time that I also picked up a copy of Skyword Sword. My goal now is to play through all of the LOZ games tin "chronological" order.

I have been toying with the idea of potentially getting into Twitch streaming some games and this has also sparked my interest in doing this. I am in the process of looking at what sort of small PC box I can get that I can put in my entertainment center to capture and stream the video feed to twitch. The problem is I don't want to drop $500 on a small PC just to capture a non-HD stream. If anyone out there has some advice on a small box I can build for $200 or so, let me know. 

For as long as I can remember I always had a fascination with space. I have always loved science fiction and the stars and the constellations and planets. All of it. When I was a little kid I remember that my parents bought me all sorts of books, but there are two that stick out in my mind. One was a book all about our solar system, but I can't remember the name. I do recall that it had these fold out pages that would expand to talk about each of the planets and moons. I remember those pages got sort of trashed as I folded them back into the book improperly. 

The other book that sticks in my mind is a book about the constellations called "The Glow in the Dark Night Sky Book". I remember it distinctly because all of the stars and constellations in the book would glow in the dark. It was such a cool book. We also had a telescope that my dad had. We rarely ever used it, but I remember it would sit in the corner of the dining room. It had a small dent in the side of it. I do remember using it one summer night though and we looked at the moon and I thought it was one of the coolest things I ever saw. I remember having to track the movement of the moon with the small parts on the telescope. It really gave you a sense of how fast and how much the moon actually moves. 

So where is all of those going? Well, over at Reddit I have seen several posts of some amazing backyard astronomy shots from this post.  I really has be chomping at the bit to look into getting a telescope for some backyard viewing and hopefully some photos as well. 

Let's see where this goes. 

I have had a small obsession recently with a game called Warfare on the Xbox. It is a free to play PC/Xbox/PS4 game that came out about six months ago. I picked it up initially and played it for a few weeks and then put it down. It came out on the consoles right around the same time as Destiny and it a lot of ways it is the same sort of game as Destiny, except that it is third person to Destiny's first person. It is a loot based, quasi-MMO. You play as a Tenno, a being of some sort that can inhabit bodies call war frames. The story is pretty thin, but the gameplay is quite fun and I honestly think it does right what Destiny was trying to do.

It is a loot grind, which means you will be playing the same missions over and over, but it does succeed in providing you all those juicy item drops that and loot based game does. Recent updates have made the game much more playable on the consoles with a controller and I have found it is one of the few games on the new Xbox that consistently has people chatting in it. 

There is something done right about this nice, mindless online component to Warfare. It is almost all cooperative so if you are the type of person who doesn't enjoy or isn't good at online competitive play, then you can still get into the community here and enjoy your time online. The pacing is just right with the loot you get where you can still keep progressing forward and building more gear for your Tenno. 

What surprised me the mot though is how well the developer has done the FTP aspect. You can earn almost everything in the game without paying a single dollar. The purchase platinum in the game basically gives you really cool cosmetic upgrades and also allows you access to what they call "Prime" versions of war frames and gear. So, I'll admit that I gave the developer $20 and picked out some Platinum to get some cool additional gear. 

Megan and I had a great time heading to the Chicago Auto-Show yesterday. It has been several years since we last attended and it is always a fun thing to go see. The show is always huge and the crowds are always insane. We were exhausted by the end of the day, but it was ultimately fun to see some of the cars on the show floor. 

I have always enjoyed looking at the concept cars that these companies put out. I was surprised that there didn't appear to really be than many concept vehicles. Overall though there are some nice cars and it puts some things into perspective for a future car purchase that may be coming down the pipeline in the next 12-16 months.