I’m done with posting for this week as it’s time to overhaul my (very, very humble) apartment studio space and gear closet. But that seems the perfect time to ask you how you set up your musical workspace. (I think people imagine that I have rooms full of gear, but I really do a lot of work in-box on computer, which I’m gradually augmenting with some “boutique” – but reasonably affordable – DIY synth boxes. As an urbanist and someone on a limited budget with limited space, that works well.)

I’m a great fan of Lifehacker’s ongoing series on their readers’ workspaces, which show off marvels of productivity, efficiency, and attractive interior design:
Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell [Flickr]
For some of the best examples: http://lifehacker.com/tag/workspace/

It’s funny; the notion of “bedroom producers” is often disparaged, but I think the ability to have personal workspaces are a great thing for music. Now, a musical workspace can range from an impromptu setup on a hotel room desk to a corner of an apartment to a space you’ve built in a barn to a traditional studio. Each of those locations has its own advantages (and in a way, make you appreciate what’s special about the conventional studio even more).

So, whether you’ve worked out a mobile rig with a Nintendo DS and a tape recorder or you’ve got a dream studio you get to work in — or you want to show off how you’ve managed to organize your closet full o’ gear and cables — we’d love to hear from you. Send us a link to a public gallery in comments, or upload to CDM’s Flickr pool:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/cdmu/pool/

Also, do us a favor. Either send a note explicitly allowing us to reproduce your image, or even better, license your photo on Flickr as Creative Commons ShareAlike. (Because CDM runs ads against content, we apparently do not qualify as a non-commercial use. ShareAlike, though, means that anyone using your content also needs to share their content, which helps protect against exploitation.) You can add the license directly on Flickr, and then it’s more likely that we can use your images. I’ve actually thought of doing regular round-ups of images on Flickr, but getting individual licenses would be too time-consuming; if people do start doing this, I will easily feature the images you’re sending in!

I’m really eager to see your musical environments. Part of the joy of music is that ability to take your mind and spirit to another place, and that means setting aside physical space. (I recall a Buddhist friend of mine and the importance that had for where he would chant. It wasn’t anything extravagant, just a decision to set aside a location for the activity.)

To kick things off, Thomas Dolby has the location most of us would dream of: he’s got a wind- and solar-powered restored lifeboat on the north coast of England.

Dolby talks about his studio and the ideas behind it, followed by a new song he wrote in the boat, at TED:

Keyboard Magazine took a tour of the boat and covers all the gear contained onboard):
On Board Thomas Dolby’s Solar Studio Boat

More photos at Tiny House Design

But I’d love to see your less-exotic music making locations, too.

For an artist, being productive and being happy are often closely intertwined. Whether you’re polishing off an album, practicing your instrument, patching or coding a new musical tool, or managing your career, music requires immense levels of focus and discipline. Then there’s the matter of the stuff that tends to be an obstacle: your day job, your to-do list, your taxes. Most musicians aren’t full-time, but even if you are, sometimes the greatest challenge is simply hurdling everything that isn’t your music, leaving you time for what is.

Digital technology is naturally the bread and butter of the site, but lately, the computer has been blamed for a lack of a focus. Certainly, computers do provide opportunities for abuse: browsers with multiple tabs, always-on Internet connections, and endless capacity to switch tasks could make your computer a distraction machine. But I do have to admit, I’ve found recent allegations about the Internet frustrating. Anecdotally, they just don’t make sense: I doodled and daydreamed in class as a kid long before the Web. I’ve never really needed advanced technology to be distracted. I also can find immense, profound focus using technology. It just doesn’t add up. To make matters worse, a lot of claims that the Internet was “rewiring” your mind made heavy use of blood flow imaging of the brain, long a suspect and incomplete means of modeling the complexity of human thought.

Happily, Science may be on my side. My friend Nick Bilton wrote a superb round-up of the flipside of the argument, pointing in particular to cognitive scientist Steven Pinker’s rebuttal.

The Defense of Computers, the Internet and Our Brains [New York Times Bits Blog]

It’s well worth reading – if, like me, you don’t mind reading on a screen from beginning to end, thoughtfully.

Okay, so the medium isn’t to blame. But that leaves the responsibility square in our court. Blessed with one of the great miracles of the universe, your mind, how can you tap into your deepest channels of creative expressiveness – and get all the business of your life out of the way?

Disciplined focus

Techniques, like computers, are just tools, but they can be useful nonetheless. I’m particularly pleased at the moment with the Pomodoro Technique, in case you didn’t guess from the tomato picture that leads this post.

The idea is this: work on a task, just one task, without distractions or multi-tasking, for 25 minutes. Then take a five-minute break.

It’s incredibly simple – and, to me, incredibly effective. I’ve tried it while working on music and coding, and felt more focused. I find it does two things. For one, it gives me the discipline to avoid checking a browser tab to procrastinate when I get stuck on a task – always with the knowledge that I only have to keep up this level of focus for less than half an hour. Avoiding multitasking is essential: it allows you to make the Internet a powerful tool for inspiration.

Oddly, the other advantage has actually been that it forces me to take breaks. Often, I have no problem plunging into a task, especially something like music. The problem is, over-abundant focus can be as energy-sapping as distraction: sitting at a computer or desk, your body begins to tense up, you forget to drink water and stretch, and so on. Even working with music, that can mean that you begin to lose focus or perspective. Returning to the Internet as a tool, those five minute breaks could be a chance for a quick Internet injection of ideas from off the fovea, off the central focal point of your eye. Creativity is sometimes best stimulated by something that has nothing to do with the task at hand.

Generally, I found the technique had the opposite impact from what I expected: it made me more able to lose track of time, by keeping my body and mind in a rhythm.

See Lifehacker for more:
The Pomodoro Technique Trains Your Brain Away From Distractions

There’s even a Google Chrome extension, which is nice when you’re browsing: Chromodoro Adds a Pomodoro Timer to Chrome

Pomodoro is a native Mac app; it provides loads of configurability.

Focus Booster is an AIR app (also available in the browser) with a nice, graphical progress bar.

For everything else, I just use a stopwatch on my phone. Any stopwatch will do; you don’t really need a dedicated app.

Task management

In addition to focus, though, I’m interested how readers manage tasks. For me, this fits into two broad categories:

1. Elements of big projects, stuff I care about
2. Everything else

Task management for me is taking care of the “everything else” stuff so I can focus on the big projects. And that usually means segregating lists. I like Gina Trapani’s incredibly-elegant command-line todo tool, which I’ve found to be the quickest way of adding tasks, sorting them to find out what you should be doing next with a small slice of time, and getting them done and forgotten about – minimal management required. (I use the Python fork; see a recent happy birthday post. If I ever have time, I’ll whip up a quick Android version to keep my ‘Droid coding skills sharp.)

That’s just one tool, though; Remember the Milk is excellent on the Web, desktop, iPhone, and Android. So is paper.

What about tracking progress on big projects, though? An in-progress music album feels different than a long list of random tasks (send in a tax form, invoice so and so, pick up laundry detergent). But it can be helpful to divide big projects into smaller steps – and it can be essential to remember small details of something like a piece of music as you work. How do you manage those tasks?

For collaborative projects, a lot of people I know are great fans of simple, subscription-based Web project management Basecamp. Years after this was a highly-hyped tool, it remains helpful; it’s what I’m using now to collaborate on an electronics project and to work on an elaborate redesign of CDM.

Basecamp doesn’t make much sense if you’re polishing off your album, though, necessarily. So what tools do you use?

Mindfulness

I’ll close with one simple thought, which is that what binds all these things together for me is a simple sense of mindfulness. It’s a concept from Buddhism, reinforced in Psychology, but I find even without disciplined meditation or something elaborate, basic awareness can have a profound impact on your work and focus. Just taking a moment to take note of my breathing, stop thinking about other things for a moment, or be aware of how my body feels can radically alter my day. As I’ve talked to artists – as I did while meeting with various folks in Germany and Portugal traveling over the past weeks – I’ve heard similar things.

As it happens, the image I found above comes from a Norway-based composer and sound designer named Harry Koopman, who himself focuses on this very issue – and has short films and soundtracks to accompany them. Those films could be ideal sources of audiovisual meditation if you need something online to focus your head before an extended work session.
http://www.mindfulness.nl/

None of this is directly related to music, but for the kinds of music being produced on this site, I think it’s very relevant. Readers on CDM are often assembling their own tools and assembling their own music from scratch, working with the incredible abstraction music production on computers demands, working with scores, and getting close to the most personal, intimate sense of self-expression in musical creation. Without discipline and focus, it’s possible to wind up frustrated and downright depressed fast – and the opposite is true, too. for me is a great time to think about this stuff; it’s the break in the academic calendar (and I still am often teaching), it’s a big seasonal shift here in North America, and amidst travel and occasional trips to the beach, my head is clear. With dissertation research, software to code, documentation, writing, blogging, and music, I know I have plenty to keep me busy. Maybe having the winter mindset in the midst of summer (see photo above) is part of what makes this all work.

So I’m curious what you think. Hopefully we can follow up with more tips for keeping you creative. And digital. And musical. Creatively digitally musical.

So, let us know:
1. How do you stay focused when working on a computer?
2. Does the Pomodoro work for you?
3. How do you manage tasks – little ones, or big ones associated with musical projects?
4. How do you keep your mind happy?

I look forward to your responses.

It’s the little things that keep you happy sometimes. The Sunday Soundtrack blog has an interesting idea for tracking work on the MPC — write it down. (I have to say, I miss having paper notes as I did when I was making hard-copy patch diagrams of my Moog and Buchla modular creations in college.) This fellow has a printable template you can use yourself if so inclined – and, of course, it’d work with any 4×4 grid, not just the MPC.

Post:
Music Production on the MPC
Full-sized image for use as a template

Keep anything on paper in the studio yourself – music notation? Lyrics? To-do lists? MIDI maps? Doodles of made-up creatures to keep you company? I’d love to hear how you work.

Previously: A Brief History of the MPC

Food for thought: if we didn’t still make “albums,” we’d never know when the album was done. Sure, the delivery mechanism that spawned the album may be disappearing – “LP’s” in particular are long gone. But perhaps, like so many ubiquitous technologies, the album was a fortuitous coincidence of physical practicality and human scale, happenstance generating some unit of creativity that just makes sense to artist and listener alike.

For Imogen Heap, the beloved artist who’s just finished her latest, it’s cause to literally dance and sing, accompanied by a generative Buddha Box. (We can dance around when we get the album in August.)

http://www.imogenheap.com/

It’s not the only approach. Geek troubador Jonathan Coulton rose to Interweb fame partly through the creation of his Creative Commons-licensed Thing-a-Week podcast, which fired up his productivity as he released 52 (get it?) tracks in the space of a year. The episodic form helped him build a following and created a new unit of musical output.

From other parts of the online world, we get a little insight from each of these favorite artists. Imogen Heap videoblogs her latest album and talks promise at top, as found via the lads of SonicState.

Jonathan Coulton talks to one of my favorite non-music blogs, Lifehacker, about staying musically productive – and keeping other productivity away from his musical process. He talks about using Google apps and MobileMe as an intelligent cloud he can share with his assistant and PR person.

He also speaks to musical process:

It’s a combination of things. I generally write when I have guitar in my hand, but, capturing ideas is like … I do use the voice recorder app on my iPhone like crazy. I’ve learned that whenever you get one of those little song fragments, out of the ether, it’s like a dream—no matter how much you’re going to remember it, you’re going to forget it, in like five minutes. And I’ve lost too many of those, so wherever I am, I take my phone out, I pretend that I’m making a phone call, so that people don’t think I’m crazy, and I sing into the voice recorder, and then I have it available later on.

If I want to do a more involved quick capture of something, my MacBook has a piece of software on it called Ableton Live. It’s meant for loop-based composition, but it does recording as well. It’s very easy to capture an idea and sort of rough something out, even if you don’t have a bunch of gear handy. You can use the built-in microphone, use your keyboard as a MIDI keyboard. It’s a nice way to put together a quick demo, and capture some ideas about arrangements.

And, comfortingly, he doesn’t have enough time for music, either, and winding up wasting time on latency problems. (Jonathan, we feel your pain. And if you came to this site and didn’t find your answer, well… sorry. I need to put together a better reference for that stuff; open to suggestions!) He dives into finance, career goals, the game Rock Band and “accidental” discovery of music – all fantastic stuff. Thanks to Kevin Purdy for a great interview – who says you need music publications for great music magazines?

Jonathan Coulton on Making Songs and Geeking Out [Lifehacker]

Sound design secrets have traditionally been closely-guarded secret sauce. But in the age of the Web, the opposite is happening: people can actually enjoy sharing what they’re doing, just as passionate cooks chat about recipes on food blogs. Case in point: reader John Keston writes to tell us about AudioCookbook.org, on which he’s blogging a new sound each day. Not only is this a nice way to talk about techniques with fellow enthusiasts, but it’s a great example of how you can use blogging to encourage you to get things accomplished, rather than just distracting you.

John writes:

I’m a big fan of createdigitalmusic.com and wanted to let you know about my “One Sound Every Day” project. I am posting a sound every day on a non-profit resource for experimental sound design that I founded called AudioCookbook.org. Every post has a sound attached along with a brief description of how it was produced. I feel that the content there is something that your readers might appreciate. Please check it out and let me know if you’d consider a story or cross post, etc.

Audio Cookbook

It’s Creative Commons, so perhaps someday we’ll have a massive, open source sourcebook of music techniques from various writers.

Have a look, and let us know if you have favorite techniques of your own!

Previously:
Demystifying Sound Design: 15 Online Learning Resources for Film, Games, and More

And for an example of the same spirit of sharing for visual coders, on Create Digital Motion this week:
Code as Art: Generative Visual Inspiration and Sharing

Despite my complaints, you will find some useful music apps in the iTunes App Store – you can at least get some fine tuners. (Andy Ihnatko was excited on Twitter that one of them helps him tune his ukulele, thanks to four string support!) We do expect more hefty music tools in the coming months, and via the jailbroken platform.

But some of the real stars on the iPhone – or whatever your favorite smart mobile device may be – have to do with simply storing ideas and keeping your life together. That means one of the best downloads so far for the iPhone is Evernote. As Graham English writes in comments on CDM:

The app I’m most excited about for music is Evernote. You can record voice notes, text notes, and it even recognizes the text in iPhone pictures. So next time you write a killer hook on a bar napkin, snap a picture and sync it. Cool.

I’m a huge user of Evernote on my desktops and, via its web browser, on my Blackberry. The iPhone app looks especially great, though; I’m jealous.

Evernote for iPhone

My friend Francis Preve has written a whole set of useful tips for DJs that apply to any gigging musician / artist (which he’s been refining since the first iPod, in fact):

Top 10 iPhone tricks for DJs [Beatportal]

Some highlights:

• Keeping email templates for gig announcements on your device so you can send them quickly. (Recognize this scenario? “Hey, what’s new?” “I’m playing Friday.” “Oh, really?”)
• Mapping: Some providers require you to enable mapping capabilities on your device. Do it. Both the “real” GPS (via a dedicated radio) and the assisted GPS can be lifesavers if you travel at all. (The iPhone 2.0 update adds this feature, in the assisted form.)
• Rescue tracks: The iPhone is a capable music player, so it can, um, save you when your laptop dies or someone steals your hard drive. It even has video out capability, for you Create Digital Motion readers.

And the fact is, you can easily apply these ideas to whatever phone / smart device is your favorite. These could also put you over the top as far as cameras with phones – not because you’ll necessarily be taking attractive photos (dedicated cameras are a must for that) but because they can aid visual memory. (Airport parking spot? Check!)

I especially like Fran’s idea of logging creative time. Invoicing aside, I find that it’s so often a fight to get time to yourself that I really like the idea of keeping track of that time, whether it’s in the studio or just sitting in the park thinking about a new song. It could help give you some positive reinforcement for setting aside some working time or even badly-needed quiet time.

Going back to my first Palm (the PalmPilot Professional, no less), I’ve always found even simple mobile devices can help reduce stress, particularly on the road. And that to me is priceless.

Other ideas that boost your productivity, in terms of gigging, travel, and creativity? Let us know.

Previously:

iPod Touch/iPhone for Music Round-up (which, surprisingly, isn’t all that outdated by the App Store launch – we expect bigger announcements in the coming weeks)

RSS readers can be terrific; I use FeedDemon and NetNewsWire, both of which recently became free. (Yeah, after I bought them.) But sometimes it’s just too much to wade through RSS, especially after you get back from vacation. Alltop, a site headline aggregator, recently added CDM to its music page, and I’ve started using it as a quick way of glancing over topics like “Music” without cluttering my RSS reader more. Oh, yeah, and it’s nice to see CDM next to KEXP. Alltop is the product of Guy Kawasaki; he’s been a hero of mine since he introduced evangelism to Apple (you know where that led), and he’s still doing great stuff with business and marketing. So, thanks, Guy!

That brings me to my question, though: what’s your preferred method for keeping up with blogs and forums and mailing lists without eating up all your time for music making? (We do see CDM readers on different platforms, including someone who just spent 12 minutes reading on BeOS. Also featured: Wii, PSP, Atari, UNIX, Symbian smartphone…)

Anything we could do to help you keep up with feeds more easily — not only ours, but other sites, as well?

Quick review: the term means to unplug from the Web to allow yourself some creative space, a concept suggested by Sir Elton John himself, who wants someone to tear down the Internet so we can make some music.

I’ll be Elton Johning today in preparation for an open house showing at Eyebeam tomorrow of a project I’m working on. Create Digital Motion has been a somewhat permanent state of Elton John, but expect it to be De-Eltoned within the week — I’ve got a backlog of stories, and Jaymis is returning, along with some other guest writers.

In the meantime, we strongly encourage you to spread both the act and the term Elton Johning when appropriate to your friends and colleagues. You can also place this on your voicemail: “Hello. You’ve reached Peter Kirn. I’m sorry I’m not available to take your call, but I’m currently Elton John. Leave a message for either of us after the beep.”

What the heck I’m on about

We’ve already been exchanging some great tips for organizing your life, both musical and mundane. On the musical side, one of the most compelling software tools just got a big update today:

Minim: Music Management for Musicians

This elegant, very Mac-like utility organizes your songs, storing lyrics and audio/MIDI files and letting you track metadata about what songs are on what albums and work in what venue and are in what state and require what musicians … you get the idea. Basic features:

1. Metadata and lyrics
2. Albums and album art
3. Audio and MIDI files, images, and videos
4. Collaboration via iChat (nifty!)

The update features a slick new interface and the ability for songs to live in multiple albums. You can even upload directly to the community site iCompositions.

It looks really nice, but I’m also enjoying the wiki approach for content, since it allows the app and data to live, cross-platform, on a flash stick. Anyone know a good, TiddlyWiki-style wiki (or TiddlyWiki plugin) with multimedia support? And anyone using Minim for your music? I’d love to hear how it’s working for you.