Rainbow barf boosts productivity
Image by swider8814 from Pixabay
When I go on stage as a performing musician, my mind activates another setting. I get much more focused and find it a lot easier to enter the “flow” state. And when practicing at home, I often find my thoughts drifting away to irrelevant things. I’m probably not alone in this behavior and it’s also not surprising. There’s no “skin in the game” when practicing. There is no cost of messing up. But when you’re on stage, you will make a fool out of yourself if you don’t deliver. Hardcore, no extra lives when you mess up. I have found a very simple way to trick my mind that I am performing at a concert even when I am practicing at home.
My hobby project is a rehearsal room/drum studio. It’s been a dream of mine ever since the garage days, when our band rehearsed in various garages. To have a room full of musical instruments, all of them connected and ready to go at the touch of a button is literally a dream come true for me. A project like this is never “done” either. It just keeps growing over time. And a couple of weeks ago I opened Pandoras box, the one that said “Smart home” on it. It all started with a remote control to my car engine heater, a power hog that is fantastic if you can enter a time schedule and control from the comfort of your home. And as soon as I had added that wonderful functionality, I saw other things that could also be nice to upgrade with smart home functions. The dog kennel radiator and lights, façade lights, all the small window lamps in every room, temperature sensors in relevant locations etc. And last but not least, the drum room.
I found E27 RGB led bulbs with built-in wifi connectivity. This might sound like the most pointless thing you could ever imagine, and you are probably right, but I bought a whole bunch of them and got to work. I have added floor spotlights and tripod lights, six of them in total, and created a script so that they all enter rainbow barf mode as soon as I get behind my drumkit to practice. And this is the funny part; It FEELS as if I am on stage. My wife tells me that I’m crazy and she’s probably correct. But nevertheless, it works. I perceive a massive benefit in my playing since I gave the drum studio the rainbow barf treatment. And that makes it worth it for me – ten times over!
One shouldn’t underestimate the importance of these small things in your environment and how they affect you. Optimize your environment, one parameter at a time. Gain 1% here, another 1% there, and then you might find 2% there and so on… it adds up! I have even added the PA system and mixer to the smart home script so that the mixer fires up together with the lights, and then waits a couple of seconds until it flicks the switch to the PA system. And the inverse when I leave. That little adjustment easily saves me around 10-15 seconds per day. Over a year that equates to 90 minutes of additional playing time for me. Someone out there maybe thought about ROI here, because I just might have spent a little bit more than 90 minutes with the smart home installation and script building. 😉 But never mind that, I am also having a ton of fun and learn a lot in the process. It’s hard to put a price on that parameter.
Now with the ridiculous Black Friday hysteria, I found even more RGB that I realized I needed, so I invested in a bunch of those RGB strips too, around 20 meters in total. This will make it feel even more as if I am on stage, of that, I am sure. It turns every single one of my daily practice sessions into an occasion. I just wish that my drum module could be remote controlled too, because that would save at least 5 more seconds per day. But I’m not sure it can. Anyway, acoustic drums would perhaps be a better bet for me, because they don’t even have a power switch.