Curio

CK Barlow - Composer, Performer, & Sound Designer

Pictured here on the far right with her ensemble Out of Context*, CK Barlow is ready to play, which includes live-sampling her bandmates for integration back into the musical composition. But CK is not content with just one performance project; she is also involved with mJane, the Tricklock Theater Company, and various other solo projects.

CK is involved with so many musical and theatrical projects that Curio has become an indispensible tool in keeping her projects organized.

The Creative Space

Tracking CK's creative ideas across these performance projects is one of the most valued features she enjoys in Curio.

"If I can record ideas when they happen, I avoid losing them. This makes me more productive because I don't have to rethink, reinvent or recreate when I come back to something after two dizzyingly busy weeks on a completely different project. If I make Curio keep track of the knowns, I can use my mental energy on the unknowns."

But, beyond project and note management, Curio also helps her stay creative with its intuitive freeform environment.

"Sometimes having a beautiful or delightful or even just new tool inspires a person, breaks a mental or creative block, provides motivation that had been lacking internally."

"I might be just plain tired, but playing in Curio pulls me out of that and into a creative space, just because it's fun."

Musical Performances

Since she participates in so many bands, it is sometimes difficult to remember all the setup information needed to get the performance going.

That's where Curio comes in: for each band, she uses Curio to keep track of annotated photos of equipment setups, contact numbers for bandmates, rehearsal layouts, mic types, gear checklists, and, most importantly, cabling diagrams to make sure they are connected.

When asked how many times Curio has been useful, CK replied:

"Maybe you should ask how many times I've smugly pointed to my screen when my bandmates are wondering which cable we decided to put where the last time we rehearsed, a month ago... They call me Type A but they appreciate it, too. When you drive an hour to rehearsal, you don't want to blow the next hour re-determining how best to interconnect 3 players with 2 instruments each plus computers, all sampling each other, and using one mixer as a headphone monitor and another to record the rehearsal... yikes!"

"Yes, a notebook would work, and has, but in Curio it's in living color and faster to interpret."

Theatrical Projects

Likewise, for her theater projects, she keeps Curio projects filled with copies of scripts and cue lists — for each revision, any of which might be resurrected at any time. For a big theater project that went on for months, Curio saved the day by collecting all that information in a single project file.

"By virtue of the long time span, I could have forgotten enough ideas to score four plays if I hadn't had a good, searchable medium in which to jot them down. There was, actually, a specific cue that I had very clear ideas about and described them exactingly in Curio. For whatever reason, I didn't come back to that cue for months. When the time came, all I could remember was that I'd once had an idea. I searched and I found. In the paperbound days, I would have had to start at zero again, idea-wise."

With Curio in hand, CK Barlow has an organized and creative assistant as she plans her next musical or theatrical performance.

*Other bandmates included in Out of Context: JA Deane (conductor), Alicia Ultan (viola), Katie Harlow (cello), Jefferson Voorhees (percussion), Sam Rhodes (bassoon), Jon Baldwin (cornet), Stefan Dill (oud), Molly Jane Sturges (voice), John Flax (text).