Tell me about your music. What your excited about and what your struggling with at the moment.

I'm struggling with focusing on finishing a few tracks I'm working on. Lots of stress. My health is also not the best which makes playing on my laptop's keyboard painful and slow. I only have 3-5 months left to finish something which adds more pressure. The heat wave doesn't help either.

why 3-5 months? is that how long you have left to live.
- Correct. I wanted to finish a few tracks before leaving.

Currently in a rut with recording new music. I have a collab with a guitarist friend and we have 9 unfinished songs that have been sitting for almost a year now. Home ownership really did a number on my music-making time. There’s just always something to do or something to fix that I can’t find the time to dedicate a couple of uninterrupted hours to record music. Compare that to 3-4 years ago where I was able to release 2 albums and 2 EPs in a span of 3 years.

On the other hand, I'm looking forward to acquiring my own 8-string guitar soon so I no longer need to rely on collabs to get guitars on my music. I'm primarily a keyboardist and I make prog/industrial music.

Home ownership is a fantastic achievement. It's an unattainable dream for most. I'm sure in time the music will flow again once you're settled.

I've got a buddy who has about an album's worth of pretty killer songs dangling. He's got instrumental demos done. His collaborators are mostly not doing anything. He's a little discouraged so he's not really doing anything now.

I mention it because I'm one of his collaborators, but my stuff was done early. I can't do anything else until he's ready for the final shape of things. I hate to see him all sad over it because I think he's great. I think he should ditch his collaborators and just make the music.

Are the collaborators all vocalists? Why not suggest for you to finish off the tracks with him?
- Two are vocalists, one dark trap producer making a beat for a genre crossover, a rapper that works with that producer, a drummer (neither of us are very good drummers) which he may just get a hired gun to replace because that guy is flaky, and a mandolin player who is collaborating on a different genre crossover. My dude has range and is just out here doing whatever ridiculous thing he wants and I support that shit.
  If he needed guitar, bass, upright bass, a bunch of brass, or a couple of woodwinds I could have helped. In fact, I played one of the guitar parts on most of them (he played bass and the other guitar on all). Bass and guitar are done. A lot of vocals are done. Drums are currently scratch made with ezdrummer.
  When he's tracked fully I'll be helping him mix. He'll give me a rough pass so I can see what he's envisioning and I'll rerecord ant guitar parts that need it or double track anything needing thickening, then give it a final pass before it goes off for mastering.

Used to make some weird music, it was mainly for my ears and some one else’s the other person is gone though and I stopped. Now if I try pick it up again it just feels like I lost all the progress I made in learning and all my creativity so I stopped.

Sorry to hear that. I think once you've got a work flow down creativity flows easier. Often times I get stuck because I don't know what my next step is. But then I break it down and try to do things in a logical order.
Like write some lyrics about a topic. Then what song do I want this song to sound like. Try to match it, make mistakes, they turn out kinda cool. Badaboom a week later Ive been creative the whole time.
- Oh I just don’t see a point in making art anymore. I know there are methods I could use to just create music, but the joy is gone so I just don’t have the energy.

I run an amateur early music group, we play at reenactment events.

I'm working on my sight reading, but I feel like that'll always be the case. I'm pretty decent at the soprano and tenor recorder in the keys of C, G, and F so I need to work on more keys.

I'm decent at picking out a tune on my lute, but I need practice on playing the bass notes simultaneously when reading notation, and to just improve on reading French tableture in general.

I'm always excited to try new things; we've got a few vocal pieces that we're picking up soon.

Wow that sounds like a lot of fun. How many reenactment gigs are out there? Ive never been to one. Are they happening all the time or is it'll a seasonal thing?
- It's a blast! It's a bit like the folk music side of classical.
  As an amateur I mostly play with friends at reenactment events, probably one every month or two. There are frequently balls with period dancing for which we play the music, usually whatever the dance master/mistress chooses.
  I play with a few people who get gigs everywhere from colleges to Renaissance fairs, many have day jobs and supplement with music. There's a pretty big crossover with people who play Celtic music too, so Irish bars are another place that some folks play.