[Codo]

vAlan Belkin. JJay Berthume. OrchestrationOnline. Declan Plummer. Art of Composing. Andrew Gerlicher.

Thank you for the suggestions, I will take a look.

For instance I'm currently bored with these tutorials so I hunt samples for BtB

Sample hunting, I remember these times. I used to work with the Impulse Tracker, which is completely based on samples.
I used everything I could find, recorded from the radio, raided game sounds, recorded my voice by using head phones as a microphone...
The audio quality of my old music is thus really bad, but with all the strange samples, it has a rather weird and rough sound.

Girl, I've been wasting time for 20 years.

What is "wasting time"...
Well, I definitely could have followed my projects and skills more wholeheartedly.
But I don't think I've wasted my time. I've done research, I'm raising a child, it's not that I'm doing nothing.

A friend of mine did the exact opposite. He is a musical GENIUS. I have some recordings of his piano compositions on audio cassette. What he composed at the age of 12 is mind-blowing.
He quit a well-paid job and sacrificed everything to persue a career as a profession musician. It didn't work (for other reasons than his music), he lost everything, couldn't go back to his old job and sold cleaner agends instead, tried to kill himself, and is now chronically depressed, unable to work and isn't even allowed to manage his own finances...
It's deeply ironic that showbusiness is such a cut-throat business that it destroys the sensitive souls that could contribute the most artistically.

I'm not saying nobody should risk anything to follow their passions, because you COULD lose, but that life is more...complicated. There's no foolproof "recipe."
You can try to make the best decisions, put in your best efford, follow your dreams, follow your "purpose"...and things that are not in your control can make you lose everything.
It also has hugely to do with luck. Being the right person with the right skills at the right place in the right time. Otherwise your skills and effords mean NOTHING.
I tried to play it safe by persuing a "serious" job. The safety turned out to be an illusion on a financial level, and I definitely could be happier (who couldn't..?). But I'm still financially and menthally in a much better place than he is.
Who did it "right?" Which one of us "wasted" their time?

Of course there is still a moment when you should close the computer and go outside

The moment definitely arrived for me.
In the last year I spent way to much time on the computer. It was so bad that I became seriously socially isolated and depressed. I don't have many friends in real life with whom I can talk about my problems (I'm weird and intense, and that confuses people).
And venting at the internet made it WORSE. Afterwards I feld even more sad, isolated, lonely and misunderstood.
Nothing can replace real human interaction (at least for me), when you are emotionally in a bad place.
And if I'm working on my projects at the computer, it's way too easy for me to get distracted again. The internet is just a click away. Just a "quick" check what's going on on tumblr and twitter, aaaaand I'm getting sucked down again.

That's why I'm taking a different approach at the moment.
Piano instead of FLStudio, painting on paper instead of digital painting, reading books instead of tumblr, more going out and gardening instead of screentime.
I hope I can develop a healthy distance to the internet stuff someday, so I can work on my digigal projects again. I still have so much unfinished music, or music that I want to remake in FLStudio.
I'll show some of my older projects later this evening, which I find have at least potential. Especially if I unleash my digital orchestra on them.