What Up Hummingbyrd

i'm switching.

first of all, i'm switching jobs for the first time in over six years.
maybe it's just that i spent so much time in my current company, but i feel my job has become a bit too easy at times. it feels like i'm a part of Standard Equipment in here. complacency makes jacko a dull boy and drains away energy ... and i need that energy for my extracurricular activities. if i spend eight hours staring at a screen or doing something i could do in my sleep, i'll be brain dead in the evening when i try to focus on music.
this has been the best company i've been in and it's been a great experience to watch it grow but i suppose change is good. i want to stay active and keep my professional (i.e. graphic/game design/whatever) skills up-to-date.

the other switch is like an apple ad: i have pretty much stopped using pc:s. and my life's better for it.
after the 20" imac i bought the licenses for Logic Express and Ableton Live and I couldn't be happier with my purchase. making music on a computer has become something i look forward to instead of something that seems to sap away creativity. i'd like to go home now so i could transform a song that was previously boring and unstructured into a blatant hit. can i go now? please?

in these past weeks Logic has become my favourite multi-tracking workstation and the Express version seems to have all the features i really need at the moment. here's the first Ghost Monkey track I've fed it:

Dreamscape (Cheese Mix)

... and Ableton Live is probably the best piece of software i've used (at least seeing that it cost me less than 20% of a single user Photoshop license). this is a piece of software that works like my favourite hardware does plus some added bells and whistles. learning it has been fun in itself, a bit like learning new synths or drum machines has always been for me. because of this enthusiasm i end up using the characteristic features of the said instrument and thus, with Live ,the results will at first sound cold and computer-y as with this one-day-in-the-making-too-long-digidub:

Aero Dub



<3 t.. / polyfonken

New year, new site

Polyfonken dot com is new and improved. Of course most of you end up in here after being to the said site so this shouldn't be of news to you folks. Anyway, i spent a good couple of evenings on it and didn't use any nice gimmicks that would make it stand out. It's rather simple.

Since I'm currently in the business of trying to figure out what the hell kind of a job to apply to (one nice company already called less than two days after the new site was published), I've obviously been thinking about work and work ethics.

I'm no good with totally unchallenging safe jobs. After a remarkable stretch of work (creating Habbo) we spent at least a year fixing minor bugs, revising legal texts to make them fit the new teen demographic and all that kind of stuff. That was a real low point for me. My productivity had been very high, almost worryingly so, and now my job consisted of minor tweaks, some concepting, graphics and a lot of sitting around. (Note: It's possible that I actually got to do a lot even back then but after the stretch of doing Pellehyppy and Kultakala/Habbo, it sure felt like a life-sucking experience!)

For me there are few things in this world as depressing as wasted potential. And that kind of makes the whole job-seeking experience I'm about to embark on a bit more difficult: I don't want to end up doing totally brainless work (and it probably wouldn't earn me the massive amount of money I need to keep ahead of the loans etc.) but at the other end of that scale are thing like:
* overtime: a sign of lousy co-ordination if anything ... and I like my life.
* management jobs: I want to do stuff, not push pencils.
* huge companies: in my experience these end up making people a part of a machinery, usually one that's too big to be really effective. And I do not come with spokes.
* moving abroad. can't do this right now.

Let's see what happens. I surely can't do everything I want to and at least the music bit I have no pretensions of wanting to do professionally.

Anyways, enough of that. I did a new version of a Polyfonken tune yesterday. It's called "9 volt girl", and another one from day before that:

Nine Volt Girl

Frettimetsa