The Next Steps

I have decided to undertake several different projects in my very very spare time.

1) I am done with itb music making.  
It is not something I have enjoyed.  While I am amazed at how far things have come, and I appreciate the beauty of the soft synths I use, the end state remains: i have composed a whole three, maybe four songs with it.  I am not sure why.  I was using Logic to sequence otb songs before, the only difference is the audio component is inside.

I learned a lot, but ultimately, I found I spent a lot of time tweaking. The audio was not present--it just didn't show up. I  learned that DAWs are very clean and that it is great for making very clean music.  The music I made though, I did not like as much.  Very much an Indian problem--the arrow is better then ever.  I did, however, learn a lot about production.  The songs I made were probably some of my best to date in terms of arrangement and mixing.  I can see that production wise, DAWs are a vast improvement over a line mixer w/only trim controls.  Still, I  listen to my basic tracks, maybe just the 777 over drums, and there is an energy there, even w/no eq, fx or compression...the 777 shows up and says, WHAT THE  F--- IS UP FELLAS. LETS GET BUSY.  I did a direct comparison with the logic mono osc, and it was NO where CLOSE.

2) A bpm -> measure length worksheet
I have finished this--a Mac Numbers document that given some basic info (bpms, song components, etc), calculates the amount of time or measures required.  So for example, 4/4 @ 120 bpm, if I want 1 minute of intro, how many measures will I need?  Or vice versa, if I have 30 measures how long will it be?  I include intro, verse, chorus, outro, so that it is easy to figure out how many measures I need to record. I'll share it if I can figure out a way to make sure no personal information is embedded inside it.

3) A Python drum tab to midi file converter
A thousand years ago, I wrote a perl based drum tab to midi file converter and it worked pretty well.  It's on some hard disk now, and as Python is the new Perl (rightfully so I might add), I've decided to start it all over again.  On my wife's laptop, so this is going to be a tough thing to complete.   Basic idea is given a setup control file (that links drum part to note) and a tab file (containing drum parts and sequence), spit out one midi file per song part (intro, chorus, verse, etc) w/each part going on channel X of the midi file  OR splitting the midi file out further by part (intro-kick, intro-snare, etc).  The idea is to make it really easy to import into sequencers of choice.

4) A hw based drum sequencer
Given the plethora of DIY oem options now, I'm thinking it might be interesting to develop a DIY x0x sequencer just for drums.  I will post more thoughts on this later.  It is going to be more of an integration challenge then anything else. I plan the box to be linux based. The one thing I am not sure of--will I have to use ALSA, or can I write directly to the usb port?

Questions questions.  #4 I'm serious about, since my studio is disconnected until the kids get older, it will give me something to do.