The Week I Switched DAWs

 I had a few short pieces finished. I was into a  fourth: "Haunted House", and the music was already set in my head.  The hard part was never going to be the writing or figuring out the melodies, chords, whatever.  The hard part was getting a video file into Ableton without it choking.

I spent days on that problem.  Down-coding video in Shortcut just to get more than five audio tracks running.  Nothing against a minimalist score, but that's not always what is needed for the project.  I need to be more flexible, I think.

Somewhere in that search I found the idea of syncing two machines the way you'd sync two MIDI instruments.  Made sense.  I set it up, felt good about it, then tried to merge the two pieces together.

Nothing lined up.

I checked frame rates. Reloaded Ableton four or five times.  Watched it play correctly on the two-PC setup, exported, and watched it fall apart again.  So I loaded the video straight into Ableton instead; didn't even risk playing it first, just exported cold.  Waited.  Played it back.  Still off, but off in a new way this time.  Warp was disabled on the file.  Fixed that, and the timing got closer, but closer isn't done, nor is it correct.

Turned out the real problem was that Ableton can't send MTC.  My options were a Max for Live device that doesn't run on my version of Ableton, or a hardware box.  Neither one felt like a solution. Both felt like a tax.  Also, neither sounded like something I could get the project done by Friday.  That's the moment I started looking at Reaper.

Four days later I'm mid-switch, and of course Ableton picks that week to work again. Fixed my MIDI-OX settings, hit play, and it synced clean.  I went to lunch feeling like a genius.  Came back and none of it worked.  Turns out Windows MIDI drivers only let one program own a port at a time, and Ableton had quietly grabbed it while I wasn't looking.  The fix is to close everything, reopen it in the right order, every time. That's not a workflow. That's a ritual. Also Friday is getting closer.

So, back to Reaper.  Reaper opens faster, which by itself has already saved me hours.  But I'm fighting my own hands.  Fifteen years of Ableton shortcuts are wired into my fingers, and every session I break something because I'm using the wrong software's muscle memory.

Then Thursday I tried to load Kontakt 7 into a new Reaper track and Reaper crashed.  Tried again.  Same crash.  Reinstalled Kontakt.  Reinstalled Reaper.  Rebooted between each attempt.  Nothing changed.  Kontakt runs fine standalone.  Reaper runs fine without it.  Every other NI plugin loads. Just not this one, just not together.  I don't have an answer for that yet.  Again Friday.

With a 2pm deadline and a piece that needed Kontakt to exist, I time-stretched the video in Shotcut instead. Didn't work.  Turns out the file was variable frame rate, and Shotcut doesn't handle that well either.  What did work was printing the mix in real time: new audio track in Ableton, resampling input, arm and record while Reaper drove the transport over rtpMIDI.  Old-school, one pass, no offline bounce to miscalculate. That's how "Haunted House" got made.

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I spent twenty years in information security. My job was finding the failure point before it found you. I did not expect that skill to be the main thing I use every day now, just aimed at a DAW instead of a network. But that's what this career change actually is, most weeks. Not inspiration. Troubleshooting.

Nobody tells you that part when you decide to leave a stable job at fifty to go make music for independent film. They tell you about the joy of the work, which is real, and they leave out the part where you lose an entire afternoon to a MIDI port lock. Both are true. I still had a deliverable Friday. I still made it.

If you're switching careers, switching tools, switching anything after twenty years of doing it one way — expect the tools to fight you longer than you think they should. Budget the time for that fight into your week, not just the time for the work you actually want to be doing. It'll take it either way. Better to plan for it than be surprised by it.

"Haunted House" is up. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/9Ho2EUMAjyo. Audio's also on SoundCloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/cV8hkC2GL2pNHqQNJu

Next week I get to find out what breaks next.

Starting Over at 50

 I was laid off recently by my Fortune 500 employer, and it knocked the grounding out from underneath me. I’d actually seen it coming. I had told a few friends around last Christmas that it might happen soon. But when it did, I was still dumbstruck. I was fortunate to get a severance package, and I have some savings in cash and stocks, but I still have a mortgage on a house in Chicago.

So here’s what I’m doing about it: after 20 years in IT, a mortgage, a wife, and two kids, I’m becoming a composer.

I know how that sounds. I’ve heard it my whole life:
- safe degrees
- safe jobs
- doing the smart thing.

So let me be clear about what this isn’t.

This is not another “I was a corporate C-suite exec, or I founded such-and-such, and had a sudden epiphany I need to share with the world” story. I was never a partner, director, or VP. At best, I managed 12 people spread across the globe for a couple of years, leading an Incident Response team for a Fortune 500 company. I’m not an internet founder who cashed out and gets to wander the world.

I’m a 50-plus former IT worker about to go in a completely different direction and I have no illusions of grandeur. I’m not hoping to be the next pop sensation. Honestly, I never aspired to that kind of life anyway.

How I got here

I’m not sure exactly when it started, but at some point I began to feel like the cubicle, even a nice one, was just a slow death. We had an open floor plan, and I’d worked from home since COVID, so it wasn’t the physical space. It was that being “the cog” in a large Fortune 500 machine had stopped giving me work I actually wanted to do. Most days, I spent more time tracking down the owner of some system, application, or process than I did doing any real work at all. Wash, rinse, repeat.

To be fair, this company rivaled a lot of startups in the quality of life it offered. And the steadiness was genuinely great when I first started; paying bills on time, finally getting a car, all of it. But the emptiness in the actual work kept growing, day by day, paycheck by paycheck, bonus cycle by bonus cycle. As time went on, I fit less and less into that life.

Going back to my roots

Growing up, I wanted to be John Williams. Then it was Danny Elfman and Thomas Newman. For most of my IT career, I quietly longed to write music like Heitor Pereira or Hans Zimmer. Lately it’s been Ludwig Göransson and the bass recorder. Along the way I’ve come to love plenty of others too: Howard Shore, Alan Silvestri, Vangelis, James Newton Howard, Tom Holkenborg, Steve Jablonsky, Trevor Rabin.

I’ve also grown to love and understand the classics; Max Steiner, Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone. Honestly, I didn’t have a pretty girl on my wall growing up. I had a poster of the orchestra. Truthfully, yes, there was plenty of Star Wars stuff up there too.

That’s the direction I’m heading now: composing, and working as hard as I can in film, theater, dance, and any other form of mixed media that will have me.

If you’d like to know more about my background, you can find my resume and bio here: https://1bluebass.com/studio

I have no idea what the future holds. Maybe success. Maybe homelessness. Stay tuned to find out.

In the meantime, here’s a look at my composing desk, where all of this actually starts, and a video in what will become my portfolio. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you’ll come back for the next installment.

Until then — safe travels