Intro
I was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease (PD) in 2016 and the most noticeable symptom to begin with was a loss of dexterity down my right side. The diagnosis seemed to draw a line under the short and unsatisfactory chapter of my life where I had tried to play the guitar.
Either something in the PD condition or the medication that I take to manage
the symptoms has given me a restless creative urge however, so, in November
2021, I resolved to have a go at making music. I had a bit of experience using
the audio editor software
Audacity so I decided to use that.
I thoroughly recommend Audacity for it's many useful features but I think it's
fair to say that it wasn't designed with composition in mind. Not the way that
I did it anyway. The fine mouse control that I used was a struggle given my
disability. After a weekend locked away in my office I emerged with a 45
second
mp3 file
metaphorically clutched in one hand and a mild case of repetitive strain
injury (RSI) in the other.
After a couple of minutes of research, I discovered that there are a multitude of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) available that provide a much better starting point for composing and producing music. I was able to quickly whittle down the bewildering array of choices of DAWs by applying two criteria: I had no money and my computer runs a Linux operating system. DAWs are a big topic which I'll have to return to another time so for now I'll just say that I settled on using the free, open source software LMMS.
LMMS provides more tools to get you started with composing but it comes with a
fairly steep learning curve of it's own so it wasn't until my family and I
were self isolating in January 2022 due to Covid, that I felt I had the time
that I could devote to learning it. With all the new tools at my disposal, I
created a very different sound spanning an epic 1m 50s. After long and careful
consideration drawing deep on my fertile imagination, I named it 'January'. By now, I had the songwriting bug so 'Frost' and 'Night' followed soon after.
I named my musical project 'Lost Signal' to acknowledge that my initial inspiration stemmed indirectly from PD. PD is characterised by proteins clustering around sections of the brain that produce dopamine and thus inhibiting its production. Dopamine is a vital neurotransmitter and so without it, our brain's ability to communicate signals to the rest of our body is diminished.
Armed with an identity and a repertoire of four tunes, I created a SoundCloud page to share my music. In some ways I feel like I've come a long way in the eight intervening months. Other times, it seems like I'm going absolutely nowhere. This blog is my attempt to make sense of that journey partly for my own sanity and partly in the hope that it helps others who find themselves on a similar path. Thanks for reading, I hope that I can persuade you to pop back from time to time to read future instalments.
In the spirit of co-operation, I'll link to a song by an unsigned artist that I like for each blog entry. This time it's the hugely talented IX from Sweden.
Comments
Post a Comment