Are you a morning person?

[Jon]

I wasn't quite sure where to post this, but consider when you get up to be a mental thing. Throughout my life, I have struggled to get out of bed. Am I lazy or just have a bodyclock offset to the stars?

My theory about different getting-up-times is that back in the day, someone had to stay guard. If we all went to bed at the same time, we have no defence.

What time do you get up?

 

[Bee]

Early, early, early. Around 6.30. And I go to bed late. I can survive on very little sleep - 4 or 5 hours a night will sustain me.

 

[Jon]

So lucky! You must sleep very deeply.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

When I was in college - and particularly in grad school - I discovered that I am DECIDEDLY not a morning person. In particular, when on the weekend and playing music to pay for that college degree, I played my keyboards best after 9 PM, though some of the really LATE gigs on Bourbon Street took me later than 3 AM and I was starting to wear down by about 2 AM.

When I was taking care of my mother many years later and was on a "floating" schedule due to having earned 13 weeks of severance pay (a long story for another time), I did a lot of my writing on my novels that have reached #5 in the series, and my best work was 10 PM to about 2 AM.

I am DEFINITELY a nite owl.

 

[Jon]

I used to play keyboards, but very badly. I had an Ensoniq ESQ1 synth, and then a Korg M1 later on. I'm good at maths but rubbish at music, although the two are supposed to be heavily linked regarding ability.

I'm definitely with you on the night owl thing. I struggle getting to bed early. In fact, it has been a lifelong struggle! My intention is to get up at 8am, but I haven't done that in over a year!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Math isn't the field that correlates with music performance ability; programming and cooking do. Both involve the ability to follow sequential steps that are part of a greater goal. Programming the steps to solving a problem, following the steps of a recipe, and playing the notes written as part of your sheet music are all examples of stepwise reductionist thinking where you don't care about the forest. It will take care of itself if you take care of the individual trees that make up the forest. The customer sees the whole program; the customer eats the prepared meal; the audience hears the whole composition. For them, the experience is "wholism" but for the maker of the end product, it is designed and constructed via "reductionism."

This is the wrong forum for a detailed discussion, but the best system analysts are people who can easily switch viewpoints between reductionism and wholism. I very strongly recommend the book: Escher, Goedel, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. He has a chapter on this topic (switching viewpoints). If EVER there was a good read for the Mind Tavern, that is it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach

 

[The_Doc_Man]

PS - Korgs are good keyboards. Never had the chance to play with an Ensoniq. My home keyboard now is an old Technics F5, which you can search online to find some youtube videos of organ hobbyists playing popular music. You can also find some adds for them. Technics got out of that business years ago, but for a while they made one of the best instruments of its class that I have ever played.

 

[Jon]

The keyboards of today are so cheap in comparison to back then, and stuffed full of functionality. Then again, there are so many other distractions to compete for attention instead. Looking back, the Commodore Amiga took a lot of my attention away. What a brilliant device that was!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Yep, lots of functionality. My Technics F5 is fully MIDI compliant. Among other things, that reflects the number of different voices it has to have in order to claim adherence to the MIDI standards.

 

[Jon]

Oh yes, MIDI. I haven't heard that term in years! It was the next big thing at the time. The ESQ1 had a built in sequencer, which was great for the time. I used to connect the Korg M1 to an Amiga based sequencer. Great fun.