I've grown somewhat used to constant blogging, constant writing.. though not constant posting.. this has developed a momentum in me, that I don't want to stop.. simply because I can't get into the blog on my web site..

The momentum urges me to write about.. well I suppose my daily life. Self critical voices, in my head, suggest that this sorta thing wouldn't be interesting to anyone out side of my self.. which may have more the a grain of truth to it.. still I always believe that biography, or auto biography, can have value for more then just the subject. Still, I fear being too self obsessed.. and then on the other hand, I'm so isolated that.. who am I going to talk to about this stuff anyway? Might as well just speak to anyone who might stumble across these words.

I'm going a little mental these days. I suppose a lot of this has to do with loosing my mom, and how this has changed my daily life.. my own struggles to cope.. along with a constant questioning as to wether or not I'm making the right choices now.

The big choices involve spending lots of money. There's an equity loan on this house.. which is for my father and I to live on. That equity loan amounts to a portion of the houses total value.. I don't know what the to total value is.. as the only thing I have to go on is an estimate from when the housing market was actually good.

Of that equity loan.. my mom had put it into a CD. I took it out of the CD and distributed it between two new CDs, and the checking account.. From here it's "pay off whatever credit card bills need to be payed off.." and then you have a budget for tools.. this latter category being the part that has me wondering if I'm making the right choices.

I told myself I could spend a certain amount of money on tools.. and now its turning out that to do what I want to do.. is probably not entirely possible on my limited budget. It's possible for me to spend more.. I suppose there's nothing keeping me from doing so.. the only thing is I feel like.. before I go and spend that money, I really have to revaluate everything..

Let me see if I can take you into the upgrades I'm looking into. 1 You have the sound studio tools. In here we have a few categories to think of investing. a) effects, b) instruments, c) stuff people could play if they came over d) DAWs e) other

For effects.. we are really talking about effects for mix engineering. These are EQs, Compressors, stuff of this nature. Getting serious about mix engineering has been something I've been dong for a while now.. but not having a fuller pallet of effects suitable to mix engineering.. well that's a little bit of a problem.

Instruments. Well.. I'm moving to a new computer that uses different technology from the old computer.. and thus there is a need to upgrade the old software so that it might run on the new hardware. In this category, I suppose, we could includes DAWs.. the digital audio work stations.

"Stuff people could play" includes instruments you could have in the studio so if people came over.. you could make some noise.. my thinking on this subject is that it should include.. an electronic drum set, an electric bass, and maybe another guitar. All of which should be on the uber cheap end of the spectrum.. besides facilitating collaborations.. this would give me new stuff to start exploring.. and new ways of working.

Ok.. well the list of stuff is probably too long for me to go through, and still retain any interest on the part of my readers.. but this covers a part of the music production tools that I might like in my studio.. The trouble is that music production is only one part of the over all equation.. . which also includes photography, video / film making, animation, special effects.. and both Interactive and print design.. and probably some painting thrown in there to.. just for good measure, right?

So then you say "I want to do all this stuff for X amount of money." What you do is you go through and research the subjects.. the tools.. and try and get an idea for what exactly it is that you want to do.. in a very specific sorta way.. so that you can look at the various tools and figure out what the cheapest way might be to do the specific things your after.. at the quality you figure you need. And all along you make compromises.

The trouble I'm getting to are two fold.. 1, It seems like all I want to do might be unrealistic in terms of how much you need to learn to do it all. I'm figuring it'll take at least 6 months.. just to kind of get up to speed on a lot of this new technology / stuff I want to take on. 2 It maybe to expensive to do all I want to do, at the level I'd like to do it at.

Latter:

Good news just in.. There's a little conference / seminar coming.. on video production. One of the biggest challenges I'm now confronting in putting together a budget, is developing a sense of "what's out there." what you need to achieve X thing.. and then what the prices are.. What are the trade offs I need to make? I don't even have a framework for really understanding this.

The area's I don't know enough about are photography, video, and animation. In these areas... the question of what video camera I should get features fairly prominently.. The cost of professional and prosumer cameras are dropping rapidly as we are now in the middle of a technological revolution in these areas. Consequently there's a lot of really good cameras you can get for around $1000. The question is.. should I spend even more then that... to get a really good camera? Say as much as $3000? And then if I did' how would that rearrange my priorities? Another words, as soon as I start thinking "why yes, it's really important to get this particular thing, that is significantly more then I had initially anticipated.. now you have to rearrange everything else..

Am I rambling a little bit? I suppose the point is that I need a fuller picture to balance stuff out by.

Video can get so expensive so fast. I realize this the more I investigate what you could call "low cost pro stuff."

One question is "how serious do I really want to get with video?" How much I spend in this area ought to reflect how important it is in relationship to everything else I'm doing. Prior to my current adventures in studio upgrading.. the sound part of my studio was probably about $10,000.

Ok, this is probably too long already.. so let me just leave it here.