Ahoy! From the first day I started playing bass in high school I knew I wanted to be a musician. Not everyone around me was as excited about this life choice as I was. For the past 20 or so years I have been asked what it is I do for a living. I've shared on this blog the different ways I have labeled myself over the years, in particular, that I am a self-employed musician, not an unemployed musician. I have made my living wages from music endeavors for years now. There have certainly been times when I've had day jobs, but only as a short term fix while my music life was in flux. Today I want to share yet another way of expressing yourself to those pesky relatives when they complain that you “need to get a real job.” Today's advice is simple: You are a musician. That's it. You don't have to label yourself as a teacher, performer, youtuber, and anything else that comes with your daily life. Being a musician means you are all these things and probably man
Ahoy! Today I'd like to talk to you about my recent experience with a challenging video game. It does come back to music though, I promise, so hear me out. I set a pretty high goal for myself this year. I'm going to finish all three Dark Souls video games. For many of you this may seem like an odd goal but I'm a gamer and I've long heard about how difficult this game is and have never played through them. I'd seen a couple reviews lately for the remastered release of the original game and decided it was finally time. I got a copy and began to play. This game is punishingly difficult. For anyone who doesn't know, the ad campaign ran the slogan "Prepare to Die" and within just a few minutes of starting the game I was already dead. Several times over in fact. The game gives you no directions, no hints, no clues, no sense of how the mechanics work except for a very minimal tutorial. All this to say that the game lived up to its reputation as being diff