The Weekend...

When you work at home, the weekend takes on kind of an abstract meaning. The only thing that makes it noteworthy, to me anyways, is that the stores in my town have shorter hours. Since my town has a grand total of four stores (grocery, pharmacy, hardware, convenience) this isn’t really a big deal. Since I’ve been self-employed for a while now (I think about 20 years, on and off) I’ve never really got in the habit of having a defined weekend, in which to do weekend stuff. Even when I was working for The Man, it was largely in the entertainment industry, where the weekend is Monday and Tuesday.

Adam, however, is a creature of habit, and likes his weekend separate from work. So while I still answer support emails on Saturday and Sunday, no other Audio Damage work takes place on those days unless we have a release coming up or there’s some sort of issue. In order to make this post make sense, I have to give a brief yet clear description of what exactly it is I do for this company, and then we’ll move along.

When we design a new product, the initial starting point usually comes from me. I troll the various forums looking for “wouldn’t it be great if…” posts, or download demos of other companies’ products, and read all the reviews of plugins in the various magazines. I also, as you all know, occasionally ask here, and I keep a folder with all the emails people send us with “hey, you should make a…” shit in it. I also ask customers that are high up on the music industry food chain if there’s anything they’d like to see. (Note that this last isn’t because the kid in his bedroom is stupid and they’re smart; it’s because professionals generally have a high-stress work environment, and they can easily come up with ways to make that environment less stressful.)

Anyways, about twice a week I shoot an idea or two at Adam. Sometimes I’ll make a simple mockup (here is the one I made for what ultimately became Kombinat) so Adam can see what the fuck it is I’m talking about. It wouldn’t sound so hard, but imagine trying to describe something like Replicant when no such thing exists. Adam says “well, that’s stupid” (at which point I either agree with him or try to change his mind) or “hmmmm,” and then shoots back other things that fill the idea out (which is how Dr. Device, which started life as a simple stereo delay + filter, turned in to what it is.) I then incorporate whatever result of our ensuing conversation in to the design, and we start over.

I do all this concurrently while he is working on the code for whatever it is we’re building at the time. When we finalize a product, I generally do all the artwork necessary, he then builds the thing sans UI, then I create all the UI elements that we’re not drawing procedurally. We used to do the UIs first, but most of the recent products have had procedural bits that were part and parcel of the code (Replicant’s “ring of death,” or the XY pad in Dr. D, or the control grid in Ricochet) and these are perforce created by him. I’m actually whipping the Audio Damage horse towards the magic line where our entire UIs are done procedurally, but most recent (and foreseeable) products are a combination of the two methods.

So, if I can manage to keep from digressing for one whole paragraph, the entire point of this post was to say that, ironically, while I actually work far more with Audio Damage than any other business I’ve been involved with in my life, it is the most “normal” job I’ve ever had, where there is a distinct time period (about 11 am to 8 pm) five days a week where I actually am sitting there thinking of AD stuff, and doing AD things. So this whole weekend thing is actually kind of odd to me. To my wife, who works about 11 hours a day 7 days a week, it is an utterly alien concept.

But I’m starting to get the hang of it. This weekend, mostly because the absolutely ludicrous weather we had here kept me inside, I sat down and got deep, deep, deep in to the programming of the MD and MM. All this is an incredibly tedious and long-winded way of saying “sorry I didn’t post anything for the last two days.” I’m fairly certain I could have said that in less than seven paragraphs, but I’m not sure how.