Robin on the Radio live from Mauritius 18/09/2018
Robin’s Blog Eight part 2?
Thank you for the music part two
Insane in the membrane insane in the brain. Time for more of those block rockin beats.
No music was a predicament I hadn’t thought of, before the row. We had music during the day from the Fusion stereo, we could blue tooth or hard wire auxiliary inputs it even had a radio (don’t ask). Night time rowing, was considered time out for general listening, now it’s time for rowing in solitude in your own space listening to your iPod/music device.
I was never sure about this as personally I would have kept the stereo blasting all the time. OK, I may have turned it down for the sleeping rowers but if it’s keeping you awake you can’t have been rowing hard enough. I also believe both rowers listening to the same music helps with potential timing issues. Often my chosen music for the night was Faithless or Ibiza Classics, fairly fast paced stuff. Especially noticeable if your rowing partner is listening to Steven Hawkins talking about the universe. Clashes can happen, stars collide, black holes appear.
My universe had now gone very quiet with no music for the evening shifts. At first I just went without, two hours can be a long time though. Use the force Robin concentrate on your rowing technique, was one voice inside my head. Stop hallucinating or talking with the ghosts was another. I wondered how many songs I knew the lyrics to, in their entirety? This is something I find difficult to explain but my knowledge or ability to remember lyrics is pretty good yet I can be talking to you and mid sentence forget what I was talking about or its relevance now. So I thought of songs to sing, then roughly how long they last for. This enabled me to compile my own downloadable play lists, if my brain was functioning at that point in time. Now you could pretend to sing them, sing quietly or hum or you could just think what the hell and go for it. I tried all of these methods but plain old singing won out.
Barry didn’t look so Happy at the start of his shift, he said some fool had kept him awake or he found it impossible to sleep with such beautiful music from outside? I’m not sure which one was true. So from now on my singing was subdued to an inaudible careful whisper (George Michael would have been proud). As I tried to work out a solution to my problem.
Barry offered the use of his iPod which was extremely kind, was my singing that bad?? I didn’t accept, as the potential of turning another member of the crews evening rowing sessions into Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence was simply too great a responsibility.
Can you imagine how you would feel if you broke your crew members kit causing them weeks of solitude. A crisis like this could easily result in an accidental man overboard scenario. It was bad enough rowing in mono as the waves had soaked your right side usually. This happened on a few pairs of my headphones. How many headphones is too many?? You never have enough. Someone had managed to loose my spare phone, which we we’re using in Australia as our PAYG contact phone, so yes I have experience of loss and the disaster it can cause but that story can wait.
On one evening, star gazing, sitting in the true darkness of the night, enjoying the silence contemplating life the universe and everything. I had a moment of true inspiration, Do I have any music making capabilities on my phone? I had cleared most redundant or rarely used apps from my phone to make space as it was nearly full and had started to crash out (note to self make sure next phone has huge storage capacity and best camera ever). Wahoo what do you know sitting almost alone on my last page, there it was launchpad a superb app from Novation/Ableton So it was time to make some music. Wow this apps good, I hadn’t used it much before and didn’t remember any of the sound effects or it having as many styles of music (probably auto updates). So making music was now on my agency a to stay sane ish. I wrote an album worth of music with a couple of bonus tracks. Unfortunately I couldn’t splice them together so often ended up listening to the same track for an hour before swapping to a new track for the next hour.
For your auditory pleasure here’s one you can listen to and yes they all have slightly pun-tastic titles. This one is actually called Setting Sun.
Launchpad is a great fun app that could be considered a life saver. Thank you all at Novation and Ableton.
Why not give it a try, remarkably it’s free!
#novation #launchpad #ableton
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