{"id":55,"date":"2008-05-01T21:58:19","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T21:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.gregbueno.com\/wp\/vexvox\/2008\/05\/01\/nine_opportunities\/"},"modified":"2008-05-01T21:58:19","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T21:58:19","slug":"nine_opportunities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/2008\/05\/01\/nine_opportunities\/","title":{"rendered":"Nine opportunities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a friend who&#039;s an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.astrofish.net\/\">astrologer<\/a>, and about a year and a half ago, I asked him to do a reading about what I&#039;m doing with Eponymous 4. He said to watch out for nine opportunities. I kept that in the back of my head, but I proceeded blindly &#8212; I didn&#039;t want the search for the nine opportunities to get in the way of the nine opportunities happening.<\/p>\n<p>So which events altered the course of what I&#039;m doing today? Looking back, I&#039;d have to say:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Took courses in synthesis at Austin Community College.<\/strong> I was a lot less skilled with how to work effects processors before these classes. After manipulating sound waves to sound like other things, I have better confidence in tweaking things, although I&#039;m not inclined to tweak too much. I&#039;m not skilled enough of as a mixer to make anything incredibly polished, but I don&#039;t think my recordings sound terrible or crappy. Of course, I took advantage of my student status to get academic discounts on a number of software, including Sibelius, Sony Sound Forge and QuarkXpress. That last one is important.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Bought a crossgrade license to QuarkXpress to practice cover art design.<\/strong> I had a very ancient copy of Adobe Pagemaker, which I bought for a newspaper layout class in college. That was in 1996. Quark offered a crossgrade for Pagemaker users, of which I took advantage. Thus armed, I researched about CD package design, leading me to work with templates from Mixonic. That led to the next event.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Had some blank CDs pressed with my own cover art.<\/strong> How CDs are made was always a process shrouded in some degree in mystery. It&#039;s not all that mysterious. Mixonic, in particular, makes it incredibly easy. They&#039;re a bit pricey, and they use some unconventional requirements for submission. But having gone through the process of designing a CD cover &#8212; then seeing that package come to life &#8212; was incredibly instructional.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Moved to a bigger apartment.<\/strong> In May 2007, I faced a steep rent raise. For the size of my apartment, I felt that was a rip off. So I went to the leasing office to see if they had a bigger one-bedroom available. In fact, they had a two-bedroom apartment for $13 more than my proposed rent increase. If I&#039;m going to end up paying more, I should get the square footage to go with it. So I moved to a bigger apartment and turned the master bedroom into my studio, something I&#039;ve been longing to do. The walk-in closet was configured to become an isolation booth, and for the first time, I was able to make consistent vocal tracks. I couldn&#039;t do that in the smaller apartment because I had to break down the mic setup after every session. As a result, I&#039;ve actually made tangible progress.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Helped a friend record vocals for a stage production.<\/strong> The problem with doing it yourself is that sometimes you need to be in two places at once. By helping <a href=\"http:\/\/www.terribly-happy.com\/\">OmarG<\/a> with his own recording project, I was able to work exclusively as an engineer, not as performer and engineer. That night of work gave me the confidence to produce recordings that didn&#039;t frustrate the hell out of me.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Sent out a compilation of demos to select people.<\/strong> Now that I had some decent enough recordings, I mustered up the courage to send out a 13-song compilation out to friends as &quot;Christmas cards&quot;. It&#039;s the closest thing I got to releasing an album.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Formed a label and a publishing company.<\/strong> I felt really restless on my birthday. I was in the office when I didn&#039;t really want to be. So I found myself researching how to file a DBA in Texas. Before I knew it, I was filling out the forms, then told my boss I needed to run some errands. I filed my DBAs, then went straight to my credit union to open some business bank accounts. Without really thinking it through, I had set up business.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#039;s seven out of nine events. Kramer, my astrologer friend, mentioned something about working with other musicians becoming a difficult part of the endeavor. It&#039;s the step I&#039;ve been avoiding because I&#039;m still grappling with the idea of letting other people in on the work. I like working alone, and it&#039;s a modus operandi completely in my comfort zone. But I know I can do a lot better with some collaboration.<\/p>\n<p>Now that I&#039;ve actually taken some really serious steps &#8212; in fact, I <em>just<\/em> filed an application for sales tax permit &#8212; I have an incentive to produce something worth buying.<\/p>\n<p>I&#039;ve got another reading with Kramer over the weekend. Maybe he can shed some perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a friend who&#039;s an astrologer, and about a year and a half ago, I asked him to do a reading about what I&#039;m doing with Eponymous 4. He said to watch out for nine opportunities. I kept that in the back of my head, but I proceeded blindly &#8212; I didn&#039;t want the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkgj-T","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}