In one of my first YouTube posts which was originally titled "A Morning Routine" but later changed to "Morning Studio Survey" I said, "Most mornings I typically survey my studio work areas to decide what projects I would like to work on for the day. Over the course of a couple of weeks I work on several projects and tend to leave the resources I use near the instruments or devices I am using so as to easily resume my work. Periodically, I'll clean and put everything back in it's proper place but as you can see, that hasn't been done this week."
Part of that cleaning up process is going back through my work areas to compile to-do lists. This post is an outgrowth of that process in as much as I have made some modifications to that video and have decided that it is one that should be redone. Still the process is worth noting in terms of the procedures I follow to accomplish my objectives. Being well organized goes a long way to helping someone accomplish their objectives and that is what I'm doing this morning although in a slightly different domain than the music domain and working in my studio. For the past week I have been making plans for better establishing and maintaining my online presence and how to restructure this website and LetsPracticeMusic.com to better fulfill my purposes of sharing my experiences and knowledge about music for whoever might find that information beneficial. This also extends to the YouTube channel where the focus has been on creating graphics to use in the videos and determining the content. It ultimately boils down to creating a practical plan and schedule for implementing my goals and then executing it in a timely manner. If you're looking for information on how to get these things done I would highly recommend getting a copy of "Getting Things Done" by David Allen as it describes and effective process for putting in place procedures to stay organized, prioritize tasks, schedule time, and ACT on the plan.
When I made the original video it was simply to make some kind of content to place on YouTube and it accomplished that objective but the thumbnail and title didn't reflect in any way the content of that particular video. When I went in to change the thumbnail I also changed the description and title and rather than write all this in the YouTube description I decided to make this particular post and just reference it in the description. This is an example of what may not necessarily be a good work habit. I have a tendency to go down rabbit holes as I work on things and probably should be more focused on the particular objective I want to accomplish but I am easily distracted so somehow I must find a way to balance that. One way that I mentioned in my Biographical Summary is by having deadlines. In that particular case it's the artificial deadlines that are imposed by an institution in an academic setting but since the semester ended I shouldn't have to deal with that until August or September. But the resumption of classes this fall represents the next major deadline for me (other than doing my taxes for last year).
By the time that deadline is reached I want to have in place processes and procedures for maintaining my online presence, effectively practicing all my instruments, and for composing and recording my music. All three of these things play into my overall objective of making and sharing my music. During the past week and a half I have not done as much as I would like with the last two although I have made some limited progress because much of my work on the first goal actually requires my doing the other two. As an example, the recording of the most recent YouTube video on Modal Improvisation demonstrates practicing the exercise described as well as the need reassess the microphone techniques used when recording the video which was actually an OSB based mix of the Logitech 920c microphone and the internal laptop microphone and not the Behringer C-2 microphones in an effective configuration with appropriate EQ and compression. Hence, another task to add to the list of things to do and experiment with.
Where the execution of the plan to reach the goal goes awry is in the pursuit of the rabbit. As another example will illustrate, yesterday I was working on setting up some of the YouTube features. My goal here is to get to that 1000 subscriber level so that I can link my channel to my website. I have mostly settled on the idea of using the some variation of the Segno (
) symbol as my primary icon and eventually will place it in various locations such as all browser tabs for this site and this will likely be a key component of my branding across my sites. The rabbit jumped into his hole and off I went chasing it. First, is there a way I can type this in using a unicode character so I will be inserted in this and other web pages without my having to import a graphic image of it? Well, yes and no. It exists in the musical symbol subset of the the unicode character set as 1D10B so I should simply be able to type D10B; in the HTML code for the page and it should appear but as you can see here () it didn't work at all. (You can look at the source for the page to see the code in the parenthesis.)
The rabbit turns down another tunnel. I know the symbol is in a Finale font so can I get the image into Adobe Illustrator and use the keyboard to generate it easily? Yes, but.... Because I do not know Illustrator very well I had to go through some tutorials and other web pages to figure out how to get what I wanted done. I created an artboard of the requisite size (800x800px) and then selected the Petrucci font of musical symbols. I then proceeded to type every character on the keyboard, both upper and lower cases, to see if it was mapped to any of the keys. Success! Typing shift-5 or the % symbol will result in displaying the Segno sign using the Pettruci font! While still chasing the rabbit down that tunnel I decided to leave myself some bread crumbs so I could find my way back if I ever needed to do so. I created a document with the keyboard mappings of the Petrucci font in case I need to get some of the other symbols at some time in the future.
I finally saw the rabbit up ahead in the tunnel but there were some obstacles between us. I had to figure out how to resize it, change the color, and add the text "Click here to - Subscribe" in another layer, and then how to export the image as a transparent png file. As you can see, I finally captured that rabbit but it's not quite as tasty as I had hoped for. Still it serves my purposes. 
It's now on all my YouTube videos, has my branding icon as the blue background, and when you hover your mouse over it, it will prompt you to Subscribe Now! Unfortunately I see another rabbit here, the need to set the wrapping around the image in this document so it doesn't leave all the white space you see but that's a rabbit to chase some other day.
Today's rabbit is really a rabbit family. I'm trying to organize a collection of notes about things I need to do to reach the goal I mentioned above about having a process in place to manage my online presence. Mommy rabbit and Daddy rabbit are the two websites and the YouTube channels and they have multiplied like rabbits. Their children include getting a better understanding of Joomla to maintain the websites, creating graphic banners that are more reflective of the brand I am developing, generating relevant content about each mediums respective purpose, clearly defining the purpose of each medium, getting a better understanding of YouTube's Creator Studio, setting up procedures to follow for generating each type of content item including video recordings, sound recordings, notation transcriptions, written articles, graphic images, and other types of content, learning how to best use OBS (Open Broadcaster Studio) to live stream when I launch my short weekly show next month, acquiring and configuring additional equipment to facilitate my workflow, putting together a practical schedule for completing these tasks before school resumes, and finally getting all these rabbits recaptured so I do what I really want to do - create my music and share that with you.