web analytics

Stephen Pickering

Author: Stephen Pickering

  • Three Pieces of Great Life Advice I Gleaned From Twitter Today

    Sounds weird right? Twitter is the negative capital of the world it would seem. It seems almost like a magnet for negativity and arguing. Boy, I spent too much of my life during the last decade engaging in both, and still do at times, although I’m much more conscious of it.

    #1 Chase Jarvis. I swear there are days, and today was one of them when I said to myself, I need to unfollow everyone on Twitter except for Chase Jarvis. He’s all you need! He’s like Bob Proctor 2.0 except he specializes in the Creative career. If you really wanted to turn your life around, and especially if your dream was to be a creative (artist, writer, painter, photographer, movie-maker, actually in today’s world creativity can be applied to any career) I think listening to Chase Jarvis non-stop would do the trick. I’m certain it would.

    #2 This was an unlikely source and for an unlikely and controversial reason, but I thought the main point he made was so golden. It was from Tim Brando, a former Sports Broadcaster, who was really pissed off about the way the leadership in Athletics at the collegiate level has been so poor in the face of COVID-19. At any rate, and I do trust his judgement on such issues, but I know that point could be debated, but I thought his immediate cure was self-help gold:
    “Do what you love. Get your mind off what pisses you off!” It may not sound sexy, but it works!

    #3 Dolly Parton. Actually this one isn’t from twitter. I heard it last night, but I can’t remember from where, but I thought it really hit home. “Find out what you are good at, and do it on purpose.” It sounds too simple to be true, but that one sentence is almost all you need to know to not only be happy in life (if you are good at it, it’s usually something you enjoy in and of itself) and also make a good living that provides at the very least for your food and shelter and more than likely for a whole lot more.

  • What the Call in Mythology Means to Your Life Now

    When you follow your calling, when you listen to what your soul is telling you you are here for, when you follow that “Theseus” thin thread out of the Labyrinth to the T, then the whole universe opens up and comes to your aide, and a magical track opens up that automatically takes you where you need to be, and the things you need to fulfill your destiny come to you automatically. Life becomes effortless simply by making a decision to say ‘yes’ to your calling which is more often than not, not respected by the outside world, and that’s one of the first hurdles.  

  • How to Fix a Spotify Embed That’s Too Tall or Stretches Too Far Down the Page

    I just released a new single last week, and when I created a new post about it, which included a Spotify embed of the single, even though the embed only contained two songs it stretched all the way down the page. When I google searched for a solution, I came to this page: Spotify embeds have large blank space at bottom on WordPress.org, but their solution, a bit of CSS code added to your Appearance >> Themes >> Customize >> Additional CSS didn’t work for me. As of this writing I’m using the TwentyTwenty WordPress theme.

    At first I thought I found the answer simply by adding px after the height number the Spotify gives you for the code. In their code it’s just the number 180 in parentheses. I added a px at the end of that number, and that seemed to solve it, at least as an individual post, but on the main page of the blog at the domain level (as of this writing it is my most recent post), the problem still persisted.

    Somewhere along the line of my search, I found someone had wrapped the <iframe> tag that Spotify gives you in a <figure> tag which I had never heard of, but that didn’t help either. What finally worked (at least it seems so at this moment, is keeping that px addition (to the height not the width) and then wrapping the whole thing in a div tag. Here’s what the final code looks like:

    <div><figure><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/5r5zBUsuM7tsJtDC3x0AE9" width="300" height="180px" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></figure></div>

    You can see I went ahead and left the figure tag in there. I don’t know if that makes any difference or not. But the above code seems to have solved my problem as of this writing at least in WordPress and the particular TwentyTwenty theme I’m using at the moment. Just replace your own Spotify code within this nest and add px at the end of the height value and see if it works for you.

  • Just Released Two New Songs On Spotify

    My latest single just dropped on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music, Amazon Music, really every streaming platform on Earth by way of Distrokid. It’s also on regular old Youtube.

    It’s called “Just for a Moment,” and the B-Side is “Union Street (Hold On).” Give me a listen, like, and follow if you’re a fan.

  • Mixing and Mastering for Streaming Services Lesson 1

    I have a track I’ve mastered. It’s -14.7 LUFS and -1.2 True Peak. I’m pretty happy with it other than I wish it were about a decibel louder. So I thought I’d try to go for -13.5 LUFS. But it seems whatever I do the true peak is more sensitive to than the LUFS. For instance, the first thing I did was raise the gain on the Multipressor in the master chain from 1.6 to 2.0. The overall LUFS integrated went to 14.4, but the True Peak went to 1.0 which I want to keep under. Should I increase the limiter then? Shorter version of the question: How to increase the LUFS without increasing the True Peak? Thanks! I bought a copy of Levels.

    I do think I have figured out one thing: Just a small bit of audio or so can make your True Peak sky rocket out of the blue while 98% of the mix is well below your target, even though it’s not necessarily audible. Once you identify that bit, and it’s not hard with a metering plug-in like Levels or Youlean, you can create an identical track, cut and copy that bit to it and apply more processing to just it, whether that be a Limiter, faster attack time on your compressor, and then it frees up the majority of the track to breathe! [I made these comments to this video post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS07ChRkY4M ]

  • How Long Will It Take Me From Song Idea to Release?

    Last night the idea came to me as a melody A-F#-D-A-C-B. I didn’t know what the notes were until I played it on the guitar and this is where the Snarkman was another blessing, since it identifies the notes as you are playing them. Then I was able to surmise that it was over a D-C-G chord movement. I tapped the rhythm as 109 and layed down the first demo on the iPad in Garageband with an accompanying “Drummer Track.” I sang mumbo jumbo which is what I usually do just so I can get the jist of the idea before I go to sleep.

    1:49 pm. Today, I’m going to try writing the lyrics. I’m going to listen to what I mumbled last night and see if I can write some real words.
    2:30pm. I got a first verse, chorus, and half of a second verse, but I had to stop. Or maybe I didn’t need to stop, but it feels like I need to stop for a while, do some other things and let my subconscious go to work. I still struggle with just letting out anything that comes to my mind, which I think you have to do on your first draft. When push comes to shove and its going to press tomorrow you can clean it up, but for now let your mind have some space.
    I think the desire is to make everything so pretty, especially when the music is pretty, so when something comes out that is either nonsensical or not necessarily a pretty image, the impulse is to quash it. I say let it out, especially on the first draft. I’m trying to walk a fine line here with a balance between the subconscious and the conscious. I want to let each have its day in court so to speak. On the one hand if I wait for the subconscious to come up with the most perfect line, it’ll never get done, on the other hand if I just go with the first thing, not trying at all to bring some sense into the equation it won’t have any value either. “Sound and Sense” as my college poetry textbook said. An equal mixture of both. That’s poetry.

    5/19/20

    Well, let’s see. So technically I put in 40 minutes on this yesterday, but as I was doing other things the song remained in my head, and new lyrics started coming to me. Luckily with the Notes App whether I work on it at the desk or when I’m out and about with the iPhone, it all syncs up. Today, technically I sat down with it another 45 minutes or so. Well the end result is, I’ve got two or three pages of lyrics, way more than I need, but they don’t necessarily make sense together. Also, when I sing the ones I have, it just feels like there are better lyrics hiding, but I can’t force it or they won’t reveal themselves. Actually after I wrote for 45 minutes I opened up Soundtrap and layed down a couple guitar tracks. I’m a little stressed about the lyrics. It feels like a delicate line to walk between not rushing them and procrastination. I don’t mind having this creative space at the beginning, but I definitely don’t want it to go on too far. There should be some kind of deadline, but I’m not sure what it should be.