Nicholas Toone

Last year I decided to try my hand at content creation on YouTube.

I ended up doing five videos which picked up a grand total of twenty one subscribers, got some comments, and one video got well over a hundred views. Nothing earth shattering, but kind of cool since I didn’t tell anyone at all I was doing this. I never promoted my channel in any way, other than posting the videos here (and I haven’t told anyone about this site either).

While it was fun and I learned a little more about video editing, I came to realize that the sheer amount of time needed to keep a channel going is simply unsustainable for me.

The effort it takes just to get a piece of content done is amazing. Scripting, lighting, sound, shooting, editing ¹ all takes time. A lot of time, which is something I have precious little of.

Now I know there are those out there that who would simply pshaw at not having enough time ²:

“You need to sacrifice everything to make it, man!”

“You gotta hustle, man! You gotta griiiind!”

Listen, the Hustle/Grind Culture thing is toxic and grossly misleading. Like everything else, there are a lucky few who manage to break through the cracks and make it. For everyone else, the grind becomes expectation, and hardly anyone achieves the promised pot of gold.

The Grind only leads to burnout. Which leads to stress and illness.

An old manager said to me regarding raises and promotions: “There are rarely salary bumps. We reward hard work with more work”.

I have a family that I love and I work to make sure they’re happy. I have a good job that I enjoy. Both of these things take up a good chunk of my life, and I jealously covet my time outside of work and I refuse to ignore this for a small slice of the YouTube global audience.

I’m well past the time in my life where I could make it in any artistic career. In my late twenties, I made a conscious decision to stop pursuing art as a career and, for lack of a better term, I “sold out”. I got trained up in computers, snagged a job in IT and have done pretty well for myself and my family.

Music, visual art, video creation are fun for me. It’s what relaxes me during the down time that I do have. Why ruin that by hustling and grinding away my free time to pump out YouTube videos that won’t even guarantee any kind of success?

I made a conscious decision: I’ve deleted the Low Budget Lifer YouTube channel. I didn’t even want to keep it up as a “hobby” or whatever, I wanted to be completely off the platform.

I am still playing around with video creation, and any that I complete will be will be posted on this very site. When I want. How I want.

---

^1: Then there is the obsession with stats. When one of the videos got enough views to open up the stats a little more, I stared going back again and again and again to look at the graphs and charts – even though there was very little happening.

^2: This fucking guy. I could do a whole rant about this dude because: JFC, really?

 

This is a great video about Shure microphones and how you don’t really have to drop serious cash on things to get a great result.

Remember, just because it’s expensive and all the famous people use it, doesn’t necessarily make it the best. You can work with what you can afford and still get a fantastic result.

I’ve been bashing away at the seven-ish songs I have in various states of progress. It’s slow going to say the least but the motivation is there. I’m currently working on the following:

• • 1. Writing and re-working (and practicing!) drum parts
    2. Writing Lyrics
    3. Tearing songs apart and building them back up again

Number One is fun and loud even though it’s a reminder that I haven’t been practicing, which is embarrassing.  The ideas are there but my execution is very, very rough. It’s all practice, practice, practice from here.

Number Two is somewhat difficult. The last time I sat down to pen lyrics was with White Lake Mountain. Writing words for for that band wasn’t what I’d call burdensome; it was stoner rock so I drew from Science Fiction and Fantasy. No inspiration required.

This time I’m running up a steep hill. While I have some half baked ideas, I’m having a hard time coming up with topics to write about. I’m not into love songs, or party anthems. With a few exceptions, I’m not really keen on political words. I’m also no longer the angry dude I once was; I’m happy in life. I also don’t like super lazy lyrics.

For now, I’ve dusted off my thesaurus and am chipping away at words. Hopefully good things will materialize.¹

Number Three is, right now, the most important part of this whole process.

I took a two week break from the songs and then went back and listened to what I had with fresh ears. What I heard made me realize that I had fallen into a pattern. Most of what I had consisted of the same orchestration and arrangements: Guitar chords using the standard verse-chorus-verse-chosrus-overly long bridge-verse -chorus.

I like the bare bones of all the songs, but in their current state, they sound predictable. The lengths were all around five minutes and the arrangements were nearly identical; I was reminded of that Nickleback How You Remind Me Of Someday mashup.

It was time to get out the jackhammer.

I’ve stripped two songs back to just drums and bass and have removed the semi-flashy, dad rock guitars. It’s back to root notes and four on the floor beats and rearrangement.

So far so good on all fronts. There is good stuff to be found here. I just have to be patient and wait for it to show itself.

---

^1: I have to write lyrics in a notebook with a pen. I’ve tried tapping on my phone and/or laptop and jut can’t make it work probably because pen and paper removes the distraction of the internet.

1972-2022.

It starts with a metronome; common time, seventy beats per. I just turn it on and let it play: tick-tock-tock-tock tick-tock-tock-tock.

I pick up my guitar, an older electric with mismatched pickups. It never seems to stay in tune for more than ten minutes at a time. I’ve just learned to live with it.

Start simple. Em. Then G. Back to Em. G again. I learned this nearly thirty five years ago; the basic of basics.

tick-tock-tock-tock tick-tock-tock-tock.

Just start somewhere. It’ll show itself eventually.

Em. G. Em. G.

I try adding in other basics; the variations of A minors and F sharps. Maybe even a C. They’re all bland. Everyone has heard them before.

Pause. I sip my beer.

tick-tock-tock-tock tick-tock-tock-tock.

Em with G again, but a slight mistake makes it G add9. Without thinking about it I bend the A up slightly. For a just breath, it becomes a G ♭3.

There it is.

tick-tock-tock … I stop the metronome. Play it through a few times; Em, G add 9, bend to G ♭3 for a 16th of a beat then bend back down to G add 9.

I hit record in the DAW, let the click run for an 8 count then play the new bit for about two minutes just so I have it.

Stop recording. Listen back. Smile.

“Yeah, there it is.”

-=-=-=-=-=–=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Dramatic, isn’t it? I mean, it is the truth, but come on.

(more…)

Covid is still a thing. And there were truckers everywhere protesting about … I’m pretty sure they don’t even know what they were protesting about in the end. Needless to say I’ve been a bit of a shut-in. Or rather, more than I normally am. I’ve gone shopping for groceries, but haven’t been looking for good deals on music equipment. Like most others, I hope we’ll be in the clear at some point in the near future and can move on with whatever the post pandemic normal will look like.

In lieu of that, here’s a sorta update.

(more…)