Last month I was on the verge of burning out, so this month I let go of trying so hard for the sake of sanity. I had initially envisioned this as a part-time endeavor to kill time between seasons of anime, but ambitions grew and I started putting in 40 hour work weeks. That was a bit too much to handle, both physically and mentally. I started getting migraines more frequently, and getting stressed and depressed over not being able to do as much as I wanted as quickly as I wanted to. I mean, I am disabled after all. The reason I’m confined to bed is because I start suffering if I try too hard to do things. And that seems to have not changed. So out of necessity I had to take a step back and relax more. That’s the problem with turning a hobby into a profession: you need to do the tedious work to get the results, not just the fun stuff that you enjoy.
The good news is that all that exhausting and annoying work making youtube videos and shorts from three months or so ago is still paying off. I’ve mostly caught up with what I had prepared for videos, but I’ve still got shorts to post daily for a while longer. I should make more soon, but the burnout has me rethinking my approach a bit, so I’m hesitating to do more of the same. Though, it was working to a degree. Channel growth has been slow but steady. More importantly, the number of people who are becoming regulars on the stream is growing. It’s really hard to resist the urge to see “number go up” but I’m finding I really like it a lot more when a few people I recognize keep coming back to the stream and I start to get to know them more. Quality over quantity. I’d rather have a few people I know well and enjoy chatting with than a thousand followers whose names I don’t recognize.
To that end, I’ve been learning a lot of songs that my few regulars have been requesting. Over the past two months I’ve added over 150 songs to the list of playables, while my to-be-learned list has bloomed to around 300 tracks. Part of this was a realization that I had a big gap of knowledge in songs from the 1970’s, so I sat down with my parents and asked them about the music they enjoyed when they were young. I was familiar with stuff they listened to while I was growing up, but not so much what they liked before that. I figured beyond just expanding my horizons, it will also be a nice mental memento for me to associate with them whenever I hear or play the songs.
I pulled each of them aside separately and got to hear stories of their youthful adventures that were conjured up by the memories associated with music. Dad remembered driving while listening to Kim Carnes on the radio, sitting down and rocking out to Yes and Gentle Giant records on HI-FI sound systems, and the vivid mind-blowing experience of the first time hearing a synthesizer live for the first time at an Emerson, Lake, & Palmer concert. Mom was more into pop crooners like BIlly Joel, Elton John, and Phil Collins. She also brought forward Tina Turner, Heart, and Natalie Merchant. It turns out that by the 90’s their musical tastes had converged, and one of the things that brought them closer together was discovering that they had complimentary CD collections. They both enjoyed the various projects of the musicians from Genesis, Fleetwood Mac, and 10,000 maniacs.
With over 300 songs now on the docket to try to learn, I’ve started to experiment with “live learning” on stream. I noticed established streamers often take payment in exchange to learn a requested song live, and after spending some time figuring out how to make that happen for me, I think I can do it. To learn a new song I typically sing along with the original recording while reading a chart, then go over it a few times to hammer out any kinks and solidify my version. An issue with this is that playing any pre-recorded audio on stream could set you up for a copyright strike. Well, Twitch is kind of ok with it unless somebody reports you, but YouTube has a very strong algorithm that catches and marks any copyrighted audio. So, you’ll see a lot of Twitch-only streamers playing audio without a problem.
Since I’m streaming on both platforms, I had to come up with a separate solution: using earbuds to play audio from my phone during the stream. The only issue with this is that playing music stops my stream feed, so I lose the ability to monitor chat in real time while learning this new song. And because of my particular setup, going back to read chat is a little difficult. I’m in bed, and my monitors are kind of across the room, so it isn’t the easiest thing for me. But since I have so many songs to learn, I might dedicate one stream a week to learning new music. Initially I was doing this on Sunday, but lately I’ve been just taking the whole weekend off. Two days of rest to avoid the burnout seems to be working. Also since I’m not interested in monetizing until the following is larger, and probably monetizing in a different way altogether, I’m not eager to start charging for this service.
Speaking of monetization, I’ve devised a “secret” menu of things I can do that is a little out of my normal activities that mostly come with a monetary cost. Initially I had some options available for free, but after some trial and error it seems that placing a monetary restriction on them will be ideal. For instance, I’ve had several people asking me to play guitar, which I can’t do at anywhere near the same proficiency. So I placed a large dollar cost on that request, in hopes that nobody ever selects that option. Or if they do, I get a nice little payday. Live learning is also in this category, since it requires me to put in earbuds and shift my attention away from the stream. Someone finally requested a NSFW day, and that turned out to be a rather larger disruption than I had anticipated as well, so now there’s a cost associated. I’m not really expecting to make much off of these things, but who knows. It’s all a big live experiment.
Where do we go from here?
A suggestion was made to start focusing on a niche, and I wholeheartedly agree. A vision is forming of where I want to go and what I actually want to do. Right now the end goal looks like this: I play music while streaming poolside at various resorts around my neighborhood. From there people learn about the stream and can watch me afterwards, so the following grows. Maybe I’ll earn some tips, or start a patreon or something eventually. I suppose this means I should start cultivating a setlist that is highly amenable to a tropical resort, but it’s hard to stop playing just anything and everything. The few times I have played at the beach, I do notice that certain songs seem to fit the vibe better. More reggae, less emo. But I’m not sure. Maybe that’s just me.
Cutting my hair was the first step in this next phase, because I want to gain experience playing and streaming on the beach before approaching establishments to play poolside. My hair was really long, and since I still need to lay down, getting sand in it is inevitable. So I had to cut it short to be able to quickly rinse off afterward and stay within my upright time. It’s already a difficult thing to make it to the beach and back to play, and I need to reduce my upright time as much as possible. I may also need to change the time that I’m streaming, since I normally stream right in the afternoon when the sun is shining brightest. We’ll see. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do a beach side stream or two this month, please stay tuned to see how that goes.
Finally, I want to create a concept album of ukulele music tied to an isekai story which will be the main form of monetization. I’ve been slowly working on the story and finding a variety of musical ideas that I want to use. It’s going to take a lot of work to bring it all together, and I may need to go past my “part time” working limit again, but maybe it won’t be so bad if it’s creative work that I enjoy instead of annoying video editing and social media management that I detest. My target audience is threefold: a generation around my age that has young children who they could read the story with and play ukulele for, an older generation who are learning to play ukulele and might share the music and story with their children (who might be around around my age already) and a slightly younger generation who appreciate isekai stories and in which an interest in ukulele might be kindled.
If you make your living as a performer, as soon as you stop performing, the money stops flowing in. Instead, creating a multimedia product can reach a far wider audience and continue to generate revenue long after you step off the stage. The live performance is the advertisement for the album, which has long been a music industry standard. Though in modern days that has been somewhat reversed now since streaming music is essentially free, and novel experiences are worth a higher premium. Since my body is uniquely unreliable, aiming to be a performer seems like a generally bad idea. I do have one more operation coming up next month that may fix me, or it may not. It’s hard to tell, and after so many attempts, hard to have high hopes. I gotta do it but it’ll be however it will be.
A primary goal of my rigorous streaming schedule has been to develop my voice to a point where I can be happy with recording vocals for the album. Presumably, once you do it, that’s it for most of forever unless you pull a Taylor Swift and remake your Masters. I’ll probably want to make an audiobook version of the story as well, so I can reach a variety of readers and listeners. I may even try to have my artist friend turn it into a graphic novel or something similar. I started by trying to just tell the story in a purely lyrical format, but ran into a roadblock of trying to create too many things at the same time. So I decided to write out the story with all the characters and plot points first, then extract the lyrics from that, and finally layer the ukulele parts on top for the finished product. That’s the plan for now at least. I think it’s got potential. A lot of it rides on how good of a story I can make, how good the songs I can write will be, and how well my plan to cultivate an audience for this work actually goes how I imagine it will.
Curiously, as much anime as I watch, I don’t read a lot of fiction. Most of my reading is rather heavy nonfiction accounts of history, business, and economics. My latest read was “The Making of an Economic Superpower: Unlocking China’s Secret of Rapid Industrialization.” It was a fascinating story with many insightful and well documented details supporting the general thesis. Most of the writing I have done was also non-fiction, in the same business oriented report sense. So I’m actually not extremely confident in my ability to write fiction, and I’m trying my best to not underestimate the creative endeavor. But I think I can do it. I guess the only way to find out is to try!
I think its also time to rethink my approach to this blog and website. Got some ideas, but we’ll see if the body will let me actualize them. Please stay tuned!