Building habits, bit by bit

Yesterday, after I finished my post for the day, a habit that I’m trying to build after years of not sticking to writing every day, I got down to work on Seesaw.

It’s another habit I’m trying to build. Working daily on my own music, with the intent of making at least small steps in finsihing things. Not necessarily getting done with one song in a day (as some electronic musicians seem to have the habit of), but more like setting an achievable goal (every night) and achieving it.

So I’m quite proud to say that I finished the song as a draft production, and it has come out surprisingly well. This basically means it is yet another song that I could choose to professionally produce and release whenever I get around to doing it.

As usual, I shared the song with the three people that I share my works with, and all three had shared positive (varying levels of) feedback about it. The most positive one came from my ex-colleague, and hers felt more like how I had felt about the song. So I chatted with her a bit about the song and the whole creative process.

That’s when it struck me that I could write a blog post about the song, the process, and the habit that I’m trying to build. Here it goes.

Seesaw has been in my life for about 8 weeks. It was born on the day before my knee surgery. An idea had seemingly floated into my brain, inspiring me to grab the guitar to write a hook and record it on my phone.

I remember having checked out the recording after dinner at the hospital, before Jay would leave for the night. It still had it. It had me. It had the potential of being a catchy song that would easily find its place is my top 10 dance/pop discography.

I came back to it on the second week after surgery, when I was finding it difficult to sleep one night. By then the melody for the three parts of the song was set in my head, and it was easy to write lines of the right meter to fit it.

The next day I sang it for the first time, and it was a bit of a let-down because I wasn’t getting the poppy punch that I was hoping it would have, right out of the gate.

Cut forward three more weeks, and I was able to sit at my music work desk for a long enough duration to start working on my productions. Mind you, I had a good excuse to not work on this song. My pop bass was away with my bandmate, who was sub-bing for me during my recovery period.

Yet, somehow, picking up the bass that I generally use for thrash metal gigs out of storage, I started laying down the parts.

The guitars were simple. Clean Telecaster with middle-of-the-neck riffs with a lot of syncopation and muting. Drums were too. Straight up one-two kick and snare with hats. A pickup loop and claps for the chorus. Reverse cymbals for transitions.

Keys were more difficult. I needed some nice sounding pads and a gentle arpeggiator. Pads were a disaster and eventually went on mute. The arpeggiator was found after a few hits and misses. Then came the bass.

For producers/musicians out there, if you are wondering why I’m tacking bass the last before vocals, I really don’t have a good answer.

The best I can come up with is that when I lay down a bass groove after the other elements come in, it's almost like I’m jamming with a band, just like how I would in a real band. That seems to give me enough freedom to loop and come up with some bass line ideas, one of which will eventually make it to the song.

It wasn’t easy at all. Because of some damned pick-up, earthing noise I have at my desk with that bass. It was frustrating at best, and over the course of three days (not consecutive by any means), I had three versions of the bass line, each noisy in one way or the other.

Of these, the last one had manageable noise and was groovy enough for me to want to sing the song in the way that I had always imagined it. That’s how I had left the session three days ago.

So when I wrapped up my post here and opened the song session, I had no idea that it was that groovy. Also, before sitting down to write on the blog, I was jamming some songs on a new acoustic grand piano VST I had downloaded (Autograph Grand; thank you, Spitfire Audio).

Since I’m about a year into playing chords on keys (it means that not proficient at playing piano), I had to slow my chords down so that I made fewer mistakes, which also forced me to sing the same melody in diferent ways.

Finally, I had hit the right vocal texture for Seesaw. Then I tried the vocal texture on the guitar at the right speed, and it sounded good. So much so that I came up with a backup vocal hook that had the potential to fix my arrangement as well.

Voilà, in about an hour, I had done the vocal tracking and done the basic mixing. Then I did some more editing for getting the dynamics of the arrangement right and did a quick master, before cranking out a mix-down.

My first listen on my MacBook Pro speakers was a disaster. Terrible cut-through noise from the bass (instrument) over the bass (line). It had sounded so good on headphones and on the monitor speakers!

A couple of listens on some bluetooth earbuds eased my anxiety, and the song did sound great in the choruses, especially the second one, which had the new backup vocal hook glueing everything together.

By the time I was in bed, adrenaline was high, and I was expecting another night of difficulty in falling asleep. But I had some podcasts as lullabies and despite sleeping 2 hours later than my schedule, I did get a decent night of sleep.

So, after a terribly busy workday, featuring me doing a lot of re-reviewing things—because the original review’s comments were ignored—I was left with choosing to take a break from the new habit. I am tired. I was tired when I had the option of not sticking to the habit-forming habit.

I resisted. I went back to a song that I wanted to improve on. And I started the process. Before I had my dinner. That’s because I knew that I ought to give myself an early night of sleep.

So, here I am, after dinner, feeling the first waves of sleep, finishing this post, proud of having two habits with unbroken streaks.

Tomorrow will be a challenge because Jay and I are headed out to the country house over the weekend, after a late-evening physical therapy session. I do have to wake up real early and get my reading and exercise done before a whole workday and the evening shenanigans.

I’ll wish myself luck, but I’m fairly confident that I’ll keep the street intact, for I can choose to write for both. Maybe I can write about what I wrote for my second habit. We shall see tomorrow evening.

Creativity after a creative workday

There is a problem with spending your entire workday being creative, especially if you have to continue being creative beyond the workday.

Months ago—maybe years ago at this point—I was researching on the best routines for creative individuals to not get stuck at creating. The consensus answer seemed straightforward—make use of the best part of the day for your creativity.

For me, this happens to be the morning. Early morning, actually. When things are quiet and when there is more hope than the bottom of the barrel.

I still remember a period about a year an half ago. It had felt like I had come upon the gentle slope that would lead one out of a trough of depression. It was not. At this point, the trough seems more like the freshly minted ocean floor that surfaces as the ice age deepens.

There was this one morning when I had woken up before dawn and I had written a song about suicide called The Night Ends at Dawn. Within a couple of days, I was able to render it in a draft recording that somehow made me sound less like how I used to be. It has turned out to be one of the best songs I have written.

Anyway, at the end of this recording, I came to the conclusion that the more I used the mornings for music, the more I would feel satisfied being a musician.

Then my reading routines changed. I was reading more and it was easier for me to settle myself for the day if I were to have read with my morning coffee, before my morning exercise routine.

It felt okay to change the routine because I still had the evening, hopefully, after a busy but rewarding workday. And it did work, for a few months, until I started doing creative audiovisual work at work.

Coming back the full circle. Today, at work, I spent a lot of time outlining, prepping for, recording, and early post-production for some videos that I’m making as part of a video series at work.

But unlike other days, today I was positively triggered (?motivated/?inspired) by a new piano VST plugin that I could download. So right after logging out, I installed the plugin and started singing (no surprise) Dave Matthews songs. And that led to other songs and that led to me singing Seesaw, the song that I’m struggling to complete.

By the time I reluctantly peeled myself off my desk to grab some questionably safe dinner (leftover yesterday’s prawn biryani from the fridge), I had already sort of worked myself into a mindset of hope/determination to be able to make some strides on the song.

That’s what I’m about to do now. Wish me luck. And maybe hope and determination.

The Art of Self-Promotion

“So what is it that brings you to me?” asked the performance coach after the first of four awkward silences. I mention them because I still have trouble with them, which at the age of forty-two and a half is somewhat embarrassing. We were about three minutes into the first free, thirty-min session.

We had exchanged pleasantries before. I had awkwardly brought up the weather as an ice-breaker after noticing the aurora borealis-laden Zoom virtual background and the sleeveless heavy winter jacket he was wearing.

He said, “I live in the foothills of Himachal Pradesh—it’s freezing here. I wouldn’t mind trading places with you right now.”

I guess he meant “Himalayas.” I realize that my frosty metaphor could have been literal if I had been there, which is something I might need to work toward. I’m not sure if I’m cut out for perennial cold weather, but the invitation of quiet is overbearing.

I eventually respond to the question. A long and winding answer, but I eventually manage to sum it up and wait for a response. That’s when I realize that I hadn’t finished my story.

So I add,

“As an artist, I think I am well-rounded in most aspects of creation and performance. What I find myself falling short of, thanks to my depression and social anxiety, is a sustainable way to get my art out there, exposed to the rest of the world, waiting for acts of judgment and critique from people, who may not even know what they are talking about.”

A couple of moments of silence pass, and I find myself marching on:

“I guess I’m talking about self-promotion and marketing that goes hand in hand with music these days. One can even argue that content and talent is not as important as promotional skills and perseverance. I used to do this for my band back in the day, so I know I can do it. But I somehow don’t seem to have the strength anymore. The act of creation has taken a step back too because of the inevitable motion toward self-promotional stagnation. So my idea of a coach is someone who offers support and who is an enabler and a motivator for me to do what needs to be done. Somewhere between the role of a manager and a coach.”

He returns with the elegance of a backhand chip return:

“I hear you and I can help you. I work with my clients in whatever way that I think would help them achieve their goals. Twenty-four-seven, I think about them. So my clients may even get text messages from me at three in the morning. If there’s something that I think I need to communicate, I will, regardless of time and place.”

It lands gently, but it sounded intrusive and dangerous. I’m worried that the juggernaut of drive and intent might even run me over. Feelings of alienation and anxiety start to gently wash over me. It was the second uncomfortable silence, much longer than the first.

I am grateful that there is no effort to break it from his end. He seems to simply sit there in the cold and watch my grainy 720p video. Is he sizing me up? Maybe my smile isn’t thick enough to veil my vexation.

I respond with some deflective conversation until I eventually find my way back with a question about his writing. After all, he has written and published books. At least one bestseller as far as I can see from his websites. I’d even checked the book out on Amazon. I now know that it is available for free on Kindle Unlimited, which I had recently started subscribing to. I guess I’ll download it and check it out.

“You must have also gone through phases of self-doubt and reticence while you were in the process of writing/publishing your book.”

The answer is a smash.

“No. I did not. In fact, I wrote my book without even reading any. Of course, I’d read books through school and college, but nothing worth mentioning since then. I decided that I wanted to write a book, so I found a book-writing coach—India’s premier one, in fact. I took lessons and simply wrote the book. I had to choose an attractive topic, and the rest was pretty straightforward.”

The audacity! Or was it just self-belief? What would I think of myself if I had done something of this sort? What would others think?

But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

I remember my friend Dennis telling me on our way back to Medical College in his Maruti 1000. We had just had lunch at the Indian Coffee House after a morning of lectures in microbiology and forensic medicine. We had been discussing Asimov’s writing in the backdrop of The Foundation series. I had borrowed two of the books from the initial trilogy from him, but I had to pick up the rest from the lending library that my parents had bought me and my sister a subscription for.

Somewhere along, I must have expressed my desire to write like Asimov.

“You want to write?! For every book you write, you’d have to read at least ten. Maybe a hundred. Don’t even dream about it until you have read enough!”

He was/is right, of course. Reading a lot makes you a better writer. Listening to a lot of good music, written by talented songwriters and crystallized heart-felt renderings, has given me the information and inspiration to hone my musical craft too.

It has, or they have, brought me here. My as-of-yet insubstantial attempts at writing prose/poetry and producing/recording/performing original compositions stem from it or them. The mountain that is starting at me, or I’m staring at, is the process of getting it all together in a nice little package, getting it out there, planting it in the center of the cauldron of humanity.

This is the third silence, by the way. It gets broken by him this time. He tells me a story, the details of which I fail to recollect. But it did end with this thought.

“I believe in the philosophy of not worrying about what others think. It’s their job to think, criticize, and judge. It’s mine to not care about them or their thoughts. Simply put, I don’t care.”

This was the longest period of silence. I find myself immersed in a pool of awe and disbelief, shimmering with a thin layer of intimidation at the top.

Was it even polite to be this way? What about humility and introspection? I thought it was necessary to be painfully—but I guess not debilitatingly—self-aware, armed with the knowledge of one’s perfectly ignorable position in a world full of artistic pinnacles. Then again, I realize that they are propped up by artistic debacles that are more by orders of magnitude.

The conversation meanders to a close with discussions about fees and frequency of the coaching sessions. We hang up soon afterward, but my guard is up at the prospect of further monetary onslaughts, but I do have someone who can guide me about this. Another coach, in fact. A finance/investment consultant.

Hours later, what stays with me is this:

“He is either someone who I absolutely need or someone who I should stay far away from.”

The latter is already a reality, at least physically, but I think I need to move closer to him—while not being him, of course—and his state, not just physically but also cognitively.

Frustrated Inc.

It is so easy to let frustration build up. You never really know where and how it started. In fact, I don’t even realize that it has started until it sets in.

I get frustrated when I hear sounds that I don’t want to hear or when I heard things that I don’t expect to hear. These can range from mobile phone buzzes and notifications to Blu meowing to attract attention. It can be the next-door neighbor’s kid screaming or it could be the fight between two women from the slum behind my building. It could be the sound of the air-conditioner malfunctioning or the drip from a faucet that is not closed properly.

One of my wishes is to be in an environment where sounds are absolutely under my control. Almost like have a mute or a kill-switch button for everything that could possibly create sound. Something like a sound-proofed studio for a living environment. I guess I am still okay with ambient sounds, even those that are characteristic of a city like Mumbai. But they have to be nondescript. Something that can be figuratively swept under the carpet of my fucked up mind so that I don’t feel accountable righting the things that are wrong.

As a musician, feeling frustrated with technology seems like a given. I am also starting to feel like I’m getting old enough to feel like an older man who finds any new things in the environment frustrating. When I’m working on a song on my digital audio workstation, I get frustrated when I’m unable to achieve what I want quickly. Because I haven’t had formal training in audio engineering, it is easy to get lost in the maze of parameters and controls and lose sight of the art that I’m trying to create.

I get frustrated when I make typos. I’m increasingly making typos in whatever I do. I fee like my dexterity on the keyboard (for typing) and my ability to pick errors that I have made are waning. It is such an embarrassing situation when someone who has had over 20 years of touch-typing experience and over a decade of experience in academic proofreading and copyediting make mistakes after mistakes after mistakes.

These are some of the sources of frustrations that I have. Right at this very moment, at least the noise and typo frustrations have set in. Blu is begging for food after being fed and J is on the phone in the same room, getting some work done. He has moved out into the other rooms a couple of times, but he still starts conversations in my auditory range.

Maybe I should work on this pervasive frustration issue with my therapist more than anything else.

Thank you - for all the inspiration

Considering I haven't updated the blog recently, I thought of cross-posting the following from a Facebook status update.

Almost three decades ago, my dad, who's a semi-professional mridangam player, gave me some lessons in mridangam, hoping that I would take it up as an instrument. I wasn't particularly interested in mridangam or Carnatic classical then and did not persist with it. Instead, I started tinkering with the Indian flute (inspired partly by my uncle, who wasa professional flautist) because I was more interested in popular music

Two decades ago, I picked up the guitar after being coaxed into it by my sister Vidhya Venkitachalam. Around then, I started jamming with my friend Sumit Pillai on drums, also picking up basic drumming concepts. After a couple of years with the guitar, I bought myself my first bass, starting my journey as a bass player. I have weilded the bass in most gigs since then, but I also have had some opportunities to perform at gigs on the guitar, shakers, and drums.

In the last few months, however, I have had the opportunity of re-exploring my "percussive" side, with several full-length gigs as a cajon/percussion player. I can't believe the kind of fun I have had doing that. Ironically enough, my cajon technique is rather similar to what my dad taught me for my mridangam (especially right hand), and I'm able to generate a rather unique snare sound with this technique. Talk about completing a circle!

At this time, I would like to thank the following people for inspiring/encouraging/helping/supporting me in various stages of my journey as a musician, especially in the context of cajon/percussion playing.

Thank you! <3

• Aarifah Eve Rebello (for letting me "shake" at random gigs)
• Abhishek Dasgupta (for pushing me at improving myself as a musician)
• Anurag Mishra (for encouraging me at gigs)
• Jairaj Joshi (for introducing me to the cajon)
• Pritesh Prabhune (for inspiring me and helping me with concepts and tech)
• Reinhardt Dias (for inspiring me)
• Rohit Chabria (for gig opportunities and letting me use your cajon)
• Roma Kunde (for constantly supporting and encouraging me)
• Shaival Chatwani (for encouraging me)
• Sharanya Natrajan (for gig opportunities and supporting and encouraging me)
• Sumit Pillai (for all the years of jamming)
• Teemeer Chimulkar (for gig opportunities, trusting in me, and supporting/encouraging me)
• Varun Sood (for inspiring me, teaching me, and helping me bounce off ideas)
• Vidhya Venkitachalam (for pushing me to take up guitar)
• Vigneshkumar Venkatraman (for such an incredibly positive attitude and inspiring me)
• Vijayalakshmy Venkitachalam (for marrying my Dad?)
• Vishal Mallu (for inspiring me and lending the cajon)

Performing in front of an unreceptive audience

Musicians are often requested to play/perform songs in a private party environment where they are basically a part of the party party and are not performing as such for the party. If you are lucky, people can be genuinely interested in your music. Most times, however, they just want a change in the flow of the party up until then. They also want to do something cool – like singing along while someone plays a guitar.

In either situation, you can get interrupted distracted by people being disinterested in the performance or, even worse, loud conversations. As a performing musician, I’m used to such experiences and I modify my performance accordingly. However, if someone else is singing when I’m playing the guitar, they often feel so dejected that they ask me to stop the performance.

There are two things wrong here. People talking when people are playing/performing itself indicates selfishness and lack of respect toward the performers. However, if performers reciprocate by stopping abruptly, they are just being selfish and being unprofessional.

So here’s my suggestion – do not stop in the middle of a song!

So what to do? As a preventive strategy, I wait until it’s the right time (or as late as I possibly can) to bring out the guitar. Once the initial fervor has settled down, I am quick to take the guitar back out of the party floor to avoid such experiences. When these interruptions become annoying, finish the song and slyly get to your drink and get involved in a conversation. If you can guage the audience before starting the song, don’t start it at all.

Once again, I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t react to the audience. But please don’t stop midway through a song just because someone is talking loud.

Disovering GarageBand Drummer

A few weeks back, after getting terribly frustrated with the severe lack of cooperation from my band mate friends, I decided to explore software options for writing drum tracks for songs. I started asking these friends and they suggested several options that seemed relatively complicated. I needed to buy software and/or a MIDI keyboard to write drum tracks, they said.

However, I decided to do some research by myself. Interestingly enough, I discovered that GarageBand, a software that I have been almost exclusively for recording my demo tracks after purchasing my MackBook Air, had a feature called Drummer. According to the reviews online, this seemed very intuitive and good.

Before leaving for my conference, I had downloaded the extra software required for me to have full access to this feature. However, I hadn’t got enough time to sit with Drummer until tonight. Not only that, I stumbled on a video in which one pro-musician made a decent-sounding demo track, from scratch, on GarageBand, using just an acoustic guitar and a Mac machine’s microphone!

I couldn’t believe it. So I decided to try it out myself. And voila, yes, you can do it. Within about an hour, I was able to record this track using just my Macbook’s mic and an acoustic guitar.



I feel like I’m such a loser for not having known this before. Now, I feel empowered to track demo tracks for all the tracks that I have written so far. Woo hoo!