I like to haunt at thrift stores and 1-euro stores, because you never know what you can find there, and despite the items being usually cheap, they are sometimes, if you are lucky, not of lesser quality; and actually quite useful.
So, some years ago, I was at some Hamburg euro type thing, and noticed a dog light, or rather... uhm... a dog-themed light source. I guess it was supposed to be some kind of (novelty) lamp, but it was a light source for a regular home, yet shaped like one of these typical neon signs... you know, neon glowing scissor signs for hair (or other?) stylists, glowing hammers for mechanics (okay maybe i made this one up). but this one was shaped like a dog.
and even though it looked and was stylized like a neon sign, it was regular led or whatever they do these days.
and, you might guess why i bought it, because i thought it was a fun item to have, in relation to the hardcore techno overdogs magazine.
but, i am lazy, and i buy a lot of stuff, and am busy with a lot of things, and with projects. so i put it somewhere in some room, and did not pay attention to it.
fast forward some time, i think about two years... and a light bulb blew up in another room, i moved a light from the producer room as a temporary substitute. which meant my producing room was now short of one light.
i remembered the dog, unpacked the box, the thing looked really cool and cute, after all!
turned out it was usb powered, so i plugged it into the desktop computer i use for producing, and, voila, the faux neon dog lit up in glorious yellow light! which was a surprise, i thought the light would be more white-ish.
because it is connected to the usb plug, this means that everytime i do producing beyond daytime, the yellow dog lights up at night!
part 2
why i do i write this? well, to me, it's not a quirk, or a novelty, or some silly thing. when i do producing at night, this means that i can see the blue-ish grey-ish darkened night sky of Hamburg. Hamburg has been called "the city where the rain never ends", but i also like to call it "The Moonless City". Because of the rainy or semi-rainy weather, the sky is often overcast at night. so: you can't see the moon, even when it's up. it appears as if hamburg lacked a moon!
so it means i am sitting in my production room, i see through the window, there is darkness outside, i can see the lights of the high rises, the blinking lights of the planes, the electricity pylons, or, to be more precise, i can't actually see the pylons, but only the bright red air traffic warning lights that are attached to them, as if they were reddened eyes suspended in the sky. i can even see the stars, on a lucky day.
i can see some trees slowly swinging in the currents of the wind. i can see the occasional reveler on the street, or the occasional car drive by; as if it was not steered by humans to very human destinations, but as if they would lift up any moment, turn into a spacecraft, disappear into the night sky as another bright dot, before heading straight to alpha centauri.
i hear the urban hum in the background, the jet engines from time to time, the traffic noise, sometimes a fight or dispute on the street, sometimes the sirens of police cars, the distant sound of trains. and for some reason, there also seems to be construction noise in some way, even at night.
and now, to this whole mood, now the production room is filled with warm glowing, neither too bright neither too dark, orange-yellow light. out of a led thing shaped like a faux dog.
and yeah, i think you know what i want to express here. this generates a certain mood, a setting, ambience, a certain environment. it's a home studio, but the environment is not just the room or the sound characteristics.
it is also how the room feels, even when the room is expanded to the outside world. or mixed up with it.
and the yellow light adds to it, in this case.
part 3
and i don't think that's crazy, because i know many producers who, at one point, made the decision to create a kind of home studio. and they always had quirks like that. like, someone wanted to have only white colored things in their production room. another has vintage scifi movie poster on their walls. or producers keep all kind of totems and strange items in their production room, such as stuff from their childhood, or stuff that reminds them of a cool party, and much more.
some might even keep a piece of semi-defunct gear they never did part with. as some kind of technological good luck charm.
and if you ask these producers, they all will swear to you that *this is important*: that how the room they are making music in looks like, feels like, appears like, *has* an effect on production. including the choice or lack of lighting. which brings us back to the yellow dog light, woof woof!
and, the message of all this is, that if you are gonna sit down and produce music, keep in mind, that the environment, how you set up your production environment, might actually be important, too!
note: no AI has been used when writing this text.
related tracks:
topp dogg - the hardcore techno overdogs anthem part II
https://lowentropy.bandcamp.com/track/topp-dogg-black-dog-editlow entropy - future city skyline
https://encountersrecords.bandcamp.com/album/future-city-skylinelow entropy - golden galaxy
https://lowentropy.bandcamp.com/track/2019-golden-galaxy
