{"id":217,"date":"2010-10-27T22:21:40","date_gmt":"2010-10-28T02:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/?p=217"},"modified":"2010-10-27T22:21:40","modified_gmt":"2010-10-28T02:21:40","slug":"winter-is-for-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/2010\/10\/winter-is-for-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter Is For Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Most of you know I thrive on projects.  The more ambitious, the more I toss and turn over it, the better.  Sometimes I remember projects with more fondness than I honestly had for them at the time.  Writing projects can be like that, but I remind myself that this could just be important practice, training for a career in who-knows-what.  This winter I&#8217;m revisiting music reviews, and trying to review one new release a week and maybe one of my favorite albums weekly or bi-weekly too.  The good news is I put much more work into the details first this time, and I feel like I can make a more objective statement about the music itself than with my prior setup.  I&#8217;m using a rubric much like written compositions are scored against, which you can see <a href=\"http:\/\/danieltharp.com\/files\/criticalmusicrubric.pdf\">here<\/a>.  I created the rubric to cover the things I find most important, and also make it a point to reward innovation, originality, and creativity.  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m also using high-quality headphones instead of my 5.1 surround sound system.  The Sennheiser HD25-1 II is known for being neutral and true to the source, with tighter bass than other models I tried while deciding.  I justify this by my experience as a music producer, and referenced the headphones with several songs I created and found the bass to be heavy but true to the sound I was trying to achieve in my work.  They&#8217;re being fed into a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS sound card, and all equalizer settings between software and hardware are set to flat.  With my end of things sussed I had to decide on a source.  I can&#8217;t sink 10 bucks a week into a new release every week so I chose to use a music streaming service, and decided on MOG.com for their 320kbps CBR MP3 streaming.  That&#8217;s going to have to be good enough given that I&#8217;m not going to buy the discs every week and I don&#8217;t even know how critics get review copies of CDs, and honestly I&#8217;m hard-pressed to notice a difference between an MP3 at 320 and a CD.<\/p>\n<p>MOG is also writer friendly and has a section for blogs and reviews, and I plan to embrace that community and see where it leads.  Like most of my best projects there&#8217;s a fair amount of making it up on the fly, but the only way to get it right is to find out how to do it wrong.<\/p>\n<p>The first review should go up either tonight or tomorrow.  Haven&#8217;t decided on an album, or whether I want to write reviews day-and-date with the release, but we shall see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most of you know I thrive on projects. The more ambitious, the more I toss and turn over it, the better. Sometimes I remember projects with more fondness than I honestly had for them at the time. Writing projects can be like that, but I remind myself that this could just be important practice, training [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1RwV4-3v","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218,"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions\/218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danieltharp.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}