Paul Ouzounov

Well this is going to be a quick but hopefully insightful little blog post.

I’ve recently gone through a lot of turmoil. Personally, professionally, mentally, emotionally, and most recently physically. In a kind of weird way it has been really awesome despite being very painful. And yes that goes for mentally, emotionally, and physically. Especially professionally however.

Thinking upon ones craft in a third person point of view really begins to open up the perspectives of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Now that might sound like common sense, but when was the last time you did that? I know for me I wasn’t as self-aware as I am now, so for me it was quite intriguing.

I realized that I love Arabic music, and that bizarre foreign percussion and stringed instruments reverberate with me on a very meditative and personal level. I suppose it directly translates onto the guitar, as the eastern scales are my favorite. This insight lead me to write a few songs that have nothing to do with those scales – as to prove to myself that the music I was creating was not one dimensional. Cause that would really stink. Even though, however, I feel like I’m re-writing the same song and trying to make it better every single time.

And then it hit me – of course I am! I’m writing and writing and honing and going on and on to try and get to perfection: much like the fractal of water freezing in nature. I say that because the fractals are all so glorious and beautiful and each one tries so hard to be so perfect. You could say that they are all beautiful and perfect in their own way, but in terms of people, we are aware of ourselves and never give ourselves enough credit.

Okay okay, so you’ve read 300 words, and not one mention of the internet. Here goes. None of the changes in my life would have happened sans the internet. But they wouldn’t have happened without having the ability to let go of it either. Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media are so ridiculously time-wasting that you could spend most of a years worth of time on them instead of your own craft.

And then you have to ask yourself – where would I be had I ditched Facebook and all those other distractive websites? Probably a few thousand hours ahead of where you are right now. It’s all about effort, right? And if you put in a lot of effort, usually you see results? Well what are you doing reading my blog? The only time you have in your life is right now and you could be doing better things than going back to that website about cats or otherwise.

The point of this blog post is to make you the reader a little bit enthusiastic about your life and goals in your life. I know for me personally – I literally spent over 12 hours recording, arranging, mixing, mastering, and demoing two songs. Two! My workflow is impeccable for my setup, and my mixing is to the point where I am able to make very high quality demos. I turned off the side of me that needed social attention and I just worked. And it isn’t even work because it’s something that I love to do! I was just playing around in Logic. Creating music. Creating the next album in my canon.

Instead of thinking about working on it, I worked on it. The results I got were quite impressive. I’ll probably release the song in the coming weeks once I’m fully satisfied, but so far? I have about 5 out of 12 done. And over 30-40 minutes of material ready to go.

I hope you begin to see results like I do. It’s marvellous how intuitive we can be as creatures of the cosmos, and how down in the dumps we can make ourselves get.

P