In the previous post, I outlined some ideas for creating some revenue with my music. I have done two of those things I mentioned, and I would have to look into the others. First of all, I hooked up with Distrokid and I am releasing content through there. My single “Hymn of Belial” has been released there and is now available on Google Play, Spotify, iTunes and many other places. More releases will come as I sort out the artwork for those tracks.

I have been thinking. I can write music. I got some music production chops. I also have quite a bit of nice gear to record with. When I ask for feedback about my music, I usually get positive comments about my production quality (many people are actually surprised it comes from a so-called ‘bedroom’ studio). Now that got me thinking. Why don’t I generate some extra revenue with it?

I got some ideas to generate some income from this (warning, incoherent stream of thought ahead):

I also posted this on my LinkedIn, but just to have some coverage I have posted it here as well.

Yes, I do put myself out there. I have profiles on networking sites like branded.me, LinkedIn and probably some others. Usually, the recruiters and headhunters there behave themselves and don’t pester me that much. They send me messages through LinkedIn or whatever, but lately some of them have become REALLY pushy. Pushy insofar that they somehow found my personal mail address and are now reminding me through my personal mailbox to respond to some job I don’t want.

The guitar. Wonderful instrument, but also a potential source of problems when you push yourself too hard. I just came out of a bout of tendonitis, as I overloaded the tendon in my fretting hand, and most notably the tendon that connects my thumb to the rest of my body. This is called ‘De Cuervain’s Tendinosis’, and it can happen when you grip incorrectly. I usually warm up before I start practice. I stretch and massage my fingers so they are nice and limber and flexible. I paid attention to my stretching and warming up routine, and discovered I often overlook my thumb, even though you use that thing very intensively every time you grab a chord. With thrash and death metal I haven’t needed to grab overly complicated chordings, now that I am messing with black metal, more traditional chording is way more prevalent. Add a guitar with heavier gauge strings, and you end up with an overworked thumb, in the fretting hand.

Nergal was the VPS (a virtual server, for the laypeople) which used to serve this website (amongst other things). After many years of faithful service, I had to decommission it because it was draining a bit too much of my funds. So, after some furious back upping and transferring of services and data, I just turned it off and sent it to Valhalla.

So, Ave Nergal. It was fun.

I’m kinda fed up. Fed up with the current government. Fed up with the apathy and simple boneheadedness of people. Fed up with the social justice idiots. Fed up with wage slaving. Fed up with the Netherlands. Fed up with Europe.

I’m pretty much done with everything and I would much rather like to go somewhere else and do something else. Sure, my infinite patience will provide me with the means to carry on, but in my heart of hearts I would rather just leave and go somewhere far, far away, and pretty much watch the world burn from there without my participation. I would rather just go to the outer rim of the world and dive into my music.

Seems I need to reboot some things again. So I am now moving my websites to Digital Ocean. Right now, this website is running on Ubuntu, PHP-hhvm, and MariaDB. And everything is managed

by SaltStack. It’s a nice low-maintenance setup this way.

I might retire the VPS I have at TransIP. It’s becoming a bit of an expense that I can avoid. DigitalOcean seems to scale a lot better for me, and less of a headache to maintain with Salt.

Wow, what a week it has been. I haven’t been putting time into music again since I was just starting out with BMPS. If Andrath must slay, my guitar game needs some work. I have the skills, but I need to hone them again and I need to push some boundaries. I’m up for that. There are some areas I’m going to put some time into:

• Stamina. I would like to have it where I was gigging with BMPS again, possibly even better.
• Solo’s. Since I’m the sole guitarist in RÁN, this duty befalls upon me. I currently suck at that. I’ve always been a rhythm bloke that could destroy with sheer brutality. Now I need some finesse too.
• Accuracy. Especially for my solo game.
• Speed. Faster is better. I’m already quite fast, but I can always get faster.

On top of this, I still have a metric ton of material to get through. But I think I can squeeze the above into mastering the songs.

Welp, I have another project. My good friend Didrik from RÁN recruited me to play in his band. I’m looking forward to it too, since I’ll be crushing stages not before long. I do have to learn a lot of material though. It’s not all super mindblowingly difficult stuff, but still, it is quite a lot of stuff to learn and memorise. Since I am pretty much stage-ready since I have all the gear that I need (head, cabinet, axes, stompboxes, cables, pedalboard, etc), I am looking forward to getting out there again, even though I’ll be pretty much unrecognisable with all the corpsepaint, leather clothing and spikes. But I don’t mind. I might enjoy the obscurity.