Inspirations / Distractions – Gordon McGladdery

There was a very inspiring and motivating post over at Designing Sound today from a great young sound designer who I've had the pleasure of getting to know via the Vancouver Sound Design meetups named Gordon McGlattery.

I’ve learned there is a distinct difference between hobbyist/personal inspiration and professional inspiration with deadlines and accountability.

I’ve lived through both and prefer the latter.

I enjoy insights into the journeys people in indie media have taken. They are often solitary journeys in which they have had to find their own support and drive. Gord's is a good one as he's had his hand in many awesome projects already!

You can follow Gord on Twitter at @ashellinthepit

Don't fear the REAPER

(note: I am fully aware that the majority of blog entries on this topic share the same article title)

There is so much to learn about REAPER!  The scrappy DAW alternative that has been slowly building is reputation over the last 10 years is so incredibly modular, customizable and flexible that to go into it without having a goal in mind of how you want it to work for you is almost counter-productive. It's best to bend it to your will, to mould it in the image of the DAW you want it to be, the DAW you'd like to use.

There are plenty of useful (and some not terribly useful) resources but I can't see anything more valuable or educational that Jon Tidey's The Reaper Blog with articles, tutorials and inks to workshops and personalized training - it's the gateway to a community of power users that revel in sharing their expertise. It's worth any price, and secondary to buying yourself a proper REAPER license (which is kinda sorta not totally necessary but HOT DAMN should you ever do it - SUPPORT)  it is wholly deserving of a contribution to the tip jar. Jon was good enough to visit a meetup I attended at the Centre For Digital Media a few weeks ago and do an intro talk to REAPER. He's an excellent sales pitch and makes it all seem very accessible.

And who doesn't like a good acronym? 

REAPER: a Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording. 

Heh. Sure.

Another dead end...

So I was perusing the CanDevs Ontario directory looking for Toronto-based developers that might be on the lookout for an Audio Designer (me) and I found a few that look like they're accepting applications but on a couple with explicit postings looking for them.

So I'm doing my due diligence and researching the companies I'm applying to so I can at least know what I'm talking about in my cover letter and applications, or (if it ever happens) if they actually call me back. One company, Pseudo Interactive, starts looking very promising to me, in that they are a "small" company with about 50 employees and seem to be expanding their development force - and then I guess I got the "too good to be true" moment. It looks like a deal falling through with publisher Eidos caused the ground to fall out from underneath them and they had to shut down. God Damnit. Just when things started to look promising. I even sent in my resume and demo reels anyway but the emails fucking bounced. They're phones still work though (I got an answering service) so maybe I should try seeing if they're really gone for good.

And it's not as if they hadn't put all their resources into locking up that deal (which was probably a sweet one for them) they would have gotten it anyway, so they were probably fucked if they did and fucked if they didn't.

Guess it's back to the CanDevs.