Quick Update

It’s been a fractured and frantic start to 2011, so I decided today to take a little time to survey the way things have been going.

Back in December I wrote about the 150 thing, my idea to put some structure around various activities. I’m comfortably on the way to 150 home cooked meals and just making the target for 150 blogposts and 150 films in the year. However, I’m well short of the mark for reading 150 long essays, as the pile of untouched New York Review Books attests to. Perhaps most pleasing to me is that I’m currently on track for something closer to 300 guitar practice sessions; nearly once a day since coming back from holidays. That’s given me plenty of time to tackle some things I’ve never mastered properly, like Charlie Parker’s Anthropology and Tommy Emmanuel’s arrangement of Lady Madonna.

This month I’m doing something a little crazy and taking on the RPM Challenge. This involves recording an album’s worth of material (35 minutes and/or 10 tracks) during the month of February. To add some spice to the project I’m going to release the best tracks as an EP, during March. Long suffering readers will know I’ve had a stop/start solo project on hold for a long time and I’m using this exercise as a way to convince myself it is time to release that larger project. You can check out the first sounds from my RPM challenge attempt below.

RPM Challenge by fernandogros

This week I’ll be attending various Social Media Week Hong Kong events, including iMusic, which I mentioned in a recent post. I’m interested to see how these events go down, as there are some fresh faces and fresh ideas amongst the presenters and organisers.

In the past few days I completed a major sound project (more detail later this week). As I mentioned before, it is something a little out of the ordinary for me, but things have turned out well (despite a few sleepless nights) and it’s a nice little win for my company.

I’m also a few weeks into another BerkleeMusic course, this time on Music Composition for Film and TV. So far it is proving to be a great challenge and a welcome way to build my scoring and composing portfolio.

Things are a little quiet on the photographic side. I was commissioned for a business-style portraiture shoot that went well. However, that’s something I’d only do again for the right kind of client. There’s nothing coming up in the next few weeks, but I’ve got an amazing trip planned for later in the year that I’ll announce soon.

Generally though I’ve been more tired than I would like and feeling like I’m playing catch-up a lot. My email inbox is nowhere near zero and I’m not really settled into a good routine. I suspect the next two weeks will involve putting hard edges around some of my commitments and saying “no” to a few people and projects.