Daily Fun

I gotta tell ya... if you haven't popped for one of mike and his wife's DragonFjord A-Puzzle-A-Day calendar puzzles, you are really doing yourself a disservice:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonfjord/a-puzzle-a-day

These are just wonderful and cost about 2 lattes. (Yesterday's - Dec 23 - took me all day to figure out. Today I got it on my first try.) And they are great during Zoom meetings... I can listen and focus on what is going on, while doing something with my hands that doesn't detract from my participation in the meeting.

I'm giving five of these as Christmas gifts this year.

Sitting and Waiting

Today my company closes down until January. Everyone is already checked out. I can see who is online via Slack, and it is basically customer support, me, and ... that's it. But I have a meeting in two hours, so I sit here and do my Syntorial synth tutorials, and wait for the day to end after the meeting... at which point I will continue my Syntorial progress, just as if the meeting never happened... :-)

Making Music

It looks like there are several of us here on hubski who like to make music, and I've just signed up for a month-long music writing/producing class that I think others might want to join in with.

Andrew Huang is a YouTuber who has been making music online for more than a decade. He had a project where he wrote a new song and created a video for it every single day for a year, which was audacious, amazing, and led to him running out of ideas and using YouTube comments for inspiration... which resulted in the epic Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing on Rainbows.

He is an EXCELLENT product reviewer and demonstrator of all kinds of music-making hardware and software, and recently released his first music production app called Flip for the iPhone, which is quite a stunning tool.

Now he has worked with Monthly.com to do an intensive one-month course on modern-day songwriting: https://monthly.com/andrew-huang-music

In the class you will write three complete songs, end-to-end, even if you have never written a song before. He goes through the equipment and tools for music production, how to actually write a song (using good music theory), and - here's my point - people get to go through the course in pods/cohorts and work together as a group.

It is a 7-10 hour per week commitment and the class is about $250. But at the end of the class you will have three songs, completely written, recorded, mixed, and mastered... and most importantly, will have an agility with the tools of the modern bedroom songwriter... DAWs, synths, drum machines, etc.

I've already signed up.

If anyone else wants to do this, I can refer you and you'll get a $20 discount. And we can work together in a collaborative pod throughout the month. Class starts on Jan 4th. If you want in, DM me your email address and I'll get you invited.

Have a great holiday, everyone. 2020 officially ends on Jan 20th, so let's see if we can survive it all for one more month... good luck to all my hubskites!