the ball in my mouse is not rolling properly, in fact it hasn’t been rolling properly for a long time. is this some kind of weird allegory for my mental state? is the proverbial “ball” in my proverbial “mouse” busted? perhaps. but my actual real mouse is also busted, so i’ve had to buy a new one.

i’ve never been so acutely aware of how much i rely on my mouse when making music. it really is the main physical thing that mediates my creation of music - i’ve got keyboards and knobs and faders and pads too, but an unnervingly large amount of my work is done via the frustratingly fine movements of my shaky hands, trying to wrangle a little white arrow to do my bidding. drawing envelopes, grabbing hold of virtual pots, tapping in tempos and drawing midi notes with the unreliable click of the mouse button. now that i’ve got this new mouse, i’m finding that i have to learn its movements - its sensitivities are subtly different, the shape of the mouse in my hand is different. i took for granted how transparent my use of my mouse had become. now when i’m trying to navigate my way around music software i’m finding that my formerly trusty motor memory can no longer be trusted - i can’t make the fine and immediate adjustments i used to, because when my hand moves to where my brain thinks that things are, the mouse pointer now consistently misses the mark. i feel like a guitarist who wakes up to find he has webbed fingers. i must resolve to become less reliant on my mouse.

this, combined with the unseasonal heat, has plunged faux pas productivity to record lows in the last weekend but it means i’ve been doing a lot of reading. i’m learnin mama i’m learnin. a friend of mine - lets call him an ‘academic’ though that might make him shudder - he told me the other night that he wished that he could just learn knowledge and not be expected to do anything with it. i feel the same way. i have a tendency to suck knowledge in and then struggle to find meaningful ways to re-express it. knowledge just cumulates and confuses in my mind. i’m not sure what practical or specific use most of this knowledge has - i hold on to some lame hope that one day something will spring forth from my subconscious thanks to years of the gestating knowledge-mess. my mind is like the compost heap that i continue to pile shit on to, hoping that miraculous flowers will emerge despite my complete lack of interest in gardening.

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i find this whole trent reznor thing that happened last weekend really exciting and fascinating. i’m not a NIN kind of guy, though i’ve got a soft spot for the perfect drug (admit it, you do too). reznor still gives me the willies for sure. his $1.6 million windfall points to a couple of things. firstly, if you are a musician with control over the distribution of your own material, and you also happen to have a huge, obsessive, internet-savvy fanbase, new digital distribution options give you the opportunity like never before to suck millions of dollars out of your plebs.

now, let me stop here for a sec. i’m going to riff a little bit on music and money. if it makes you uncomfortable reading about this stuff, look away now. i, like many others, am trying to make sense of all of this because it feels like somewhere in there, with all these new options, there might be a way in which i can set myself up to have a sustainable music career without making artistic compromises. thats a pretty big carrot dangling, so i’m not ignoring ‘the new model’ or leaving it to someone else to figure out. i’m no expert; lets figure it out together.

click to follow me down the rabbit hole (mice hole?):

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