Mentor Program (Cherish U)

This is gonna be a cool way to start my Mentor Program at Cherish U. At the beginning of each session, I'm gonna spend roughly an hour watching an interview (since there's a ridiculous amounts of information on YouTube) with someone who I think may have a few nuggets of wisdom to share and write down whatever I got from it and then blog about it. There's always different ways to do the exact same thing, especially in music production.  Whatever nuggets I learned that day is what I'm gonna add to the song, no matter what it is. I'll learn and apply the same day.  As long as I remember to use Labels, I might be able to use this blog as a study guide for all the information I once thought was useful.

The Mentors - Once I've exhausted these channels, if ever, I'll find new ones.
Mon Future Music - In The Studio
Tues Dancing Astronaut - In The Studio
Wed EMC Australia
Thurs Midem
Fri IMS Ibiza
Sat Pyramind
Sun DJTT

Cherish U Suck

I'm better when I have direction. I tried teaching myself sound synthesis by looking up youtube videos and my problem was there was sooooo much information out there, I didn't know in which direction to go. I had no clue where to start and where I should end up. It was then I realized I needed some sort of direction in my learning. In the past I had subscribed to Sonic Academy tutorials and did nothing with them except make one song (Suck). At the end I felt I ended up with an OK song. I eventually gave up on it at the end. I didn't know what else I could do to make the song better. Like the knowledge I needed to have, I didn't. So I gave up and decided to throw it up on Soundcloud. I want to start outputting songs I can be proud of. My next three songs will be what I'm gonna call my debut (831), mainly because these will be the first 3 songs I completely do on my own, without following a tutorial. I want to learn but can't afford to go to a super fancy music production school and I can't teach myself through youtube videos because I get distracted so I've come up with my 3rd option. Something I'm calling Cherish University (Cherish U). I've decided to use Groove 3

and Sonic Academy

as a learning tool. I liked all the information Sonic Academy had and Groove 3 seems to have a lot of the same. I'm starting with Groove 3 just to do something different. I've created a course outline after looking at all the videos Groove 3 had to offer. They're all hopefully in an order that makes sense. I'm testing it out on myself. The first run I will go at my own pace, I wont move onto a new section until I think I've digested everything there is mostly to learn. Then I will do the exact same thing with Sonic Academy. I'll get the benefit of refreshing my mind with everything I just learned but taught maybe a little differently. Maybe I'll even learn some new things. From there I can make a more advanced level outline for both websites, learning new things the 2nd time around and then repeat the whole process from the beginning and rinse and repeat until I think I no longer need the videos because I know everything I think I need to know. Once I've accomplished that, I can focus 100% of my free time on making music while I go to school and work. It's gonna be a busy next few years but well worth it. Here's what the course outline looks like. Sun - Music Theory/Piano Mon - 8 Tues- Groove 3 Wed - 3 Thurs - Music Theory/Piano Fri - 1 Sat - Groove 3 On Sundays and Thursdays I teach myself a little piano and music theory with these books, going from top to bottom. 3 books to learn should be enough.

On Tuesdays and Saturdays I take a Groove 3 course going by the outline I made for myself.

Monday, Wednesday and Friday are my fun days where I get to be creative and work on my first 3 songs 831. I'm actually really excited about this.

Decided to give in.

For the longest time I had trouble accepting that iPods we're taking over physical CD's. I remember I used to have two CD binders that held 256 CD's each and those were such a huuuuuge pain in the ass to carry anywhere.

I had them alphabetized by genre so I knew where to find anything. Behind the CD I'd put the CD insert just in case I ever wanted to look at it again. My biggest fear, was losing my CD collection. If someone were to ever rob the house or break into my car or if everything went up in flames; it would suck to lose a lot of things but the thing I'd be the most upset about were those CD binders. 

The main reason I got an iPod, which was a 4th Gen "Classic", was so I could take it with me instead of the CD case, that way if my car was ever broken into all they'd take was my iPod (which did happen once in SF).

Then I got used to the iPod and slowly fell madly in love with it. I could have ALL my music in one place. I loved it! I've always had an iPod after that. The new thing the kids are loving to do these day is stream music, whether it be YouTube or Spotify or some other music streaming service. I purchased a Spotify Premium account two months ago and am slowly falling in love with new technology all over again. With the offline feature, when I want I can put music on my computer so I don't have to stream and I can also download songs on my phone! I've been wanting to get a new laptop for the last month or two. It's gonna have to come after I get buy my 2nd studio monitor to complete my set.

I'm getting tons of clips and pops when making my track in Ableton because I don't have enough memory. Its making it extremely difficult to listen to and almost makes me not want to make music. I thought in the meantime what I'll do is upload everything I want to keep to a cloud, like drop box and since all my music is on iTunes Match, I don't really need it on my computer. After doing that I could completely reformat my computer and just install the bare minimum things I need to produce until I can buy a new laptop. I went to my iTunes folder to delete the music and had it all highlighted and than it hit me that I've finally accepted the cloud for music. I didn't really need the actual files downloaded to my computer at all times. I can almost always access it either through iTunes Match or Spotify and download whenever.

Bam, just like that, I'm accepting the future. And that's just the iTunes folder, SoulSeek is another 60 gigs of where I kept all my downloaded music. Don't get me wrong, I will probably buy a hard drive and re-download everything there and keep 1 hard drive specifically for music files and I'm OK with using both as main sources and backups of my music libraries. As far as the music I'll need for my DJ Sets. I'll have 1 folder with all the songs I'll need that I'm sure isn't going to take up 100 gb worth of memory, at least I hope.