About me: Creative, Techie, Healthy, and 100% truly me .

Welcome, wanderer of the world wide web, let me tell you about myself. In my CV, I describe myself thus:

I am happy you’ve arrived at my site. I have been using rachel-rose.net for years now, and it’s gone through various iterations. Spurred on by the Google/Coursera Foundations of UX Design Certificate course, I am developing my personal brand here.

Wellness, music, and technology.

These are my passions. My true calling has taken some time to make itself known. I thought that it wass making the technical appear simple and explaining it thus. But the longer that I move in the shared and rare space between Wellness, Creativity, Personal Development, Technology and Motherhood, the clearer it becomes. I am a highly versatile communicator and I never talk down to people.

The people that I most want to talk to are women like me: Artful Mothers, I call us. Women who work outside the home, raise children to the very best of their ability, care for themselves and still nurture their creative spark to the point where a curiosity becomes a passion, becomes a side hustle, becomes an integral part of our identity. This is the space I inhabit, and I know that there are other women out there who do the same. Welcome. Nice to meet you, sisters.

Looking back, I perceive a pattern. I love tech, but care deeply about how it is used or applied. For example, I love Biochemistry, but prefer to practice Nutrition because I loved reality more than theory. Immersed in the jargon of the high tech world, I adhered to a strict rule of “no TLA’s” (three-letter acronyms). Why? Because I saw how TLAs were used to obfuscate and confuse, and that the person using them all too often did not even know what they stood for! I took the customers’ frustrations and turned it into fuel to help them. My motto since then is

“Go for the quality and the money will follow. Go for the money and the quality will never follow”.

-rachel rose

They say “choose a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”. My work is highly vocational and I love it. I am successful because I work very hard. I have been self-employed for twenty years and proudly manage almost all aspects of my business. Given that I live in Spain, I do it all in two languages (or more…I speak four)! My professional employment is in yoga and bodywork. Learn more about them at Rose Tint Your Life and Alteayoga.

Writing

I have published numerous articles about wellness, mindfulness and yoga. Please refer to the list here: https://alteayoga.es/rachels-writing/

A longer and more eclectic selection of my writing may be found in my yoga and wellness blog, stretching back to 2011. Truth be told, I was blogging before then, using the domain ravenhead.org (see a snapshot on the Way Back Machine – the archived links section is especially historical and interesting).

Music

Go have a listen to my songs and Guided meditations up on my Soundcloud page!

Creative collaborations

I have done a lot of collaborations, and Love and Faith is one of my favourite songs and productions. It is my composition (melody and lyrics, voice and guitar). The recording was done with Jake Knights, who also did the production and keyboards. Miguel Alsem did the mastering, basses and percussion.

Magma Lows and I collaborated on the project that we called “Inner Three”. I do a rap that I am very proud of on the track There is Always a Reason.

Jake and I collaborated on the dub heavy chillout track “Deep Happiness“. The track began with the voice sample, which is a Whatsapp voice message I sent to a friend who was having a troubled time. Listening back, I realised that the message and the cadence had artistic value. I sent it to Jake who then built a track around it. The original recording had some plosives and other noise, and we tried to re-record some parts. But, we could not get an exact match in tempo, pitch and cadence. Eventually, Jake took it to Miguel Alsem who tidied it up. Jake sent it to the label, NuTek Records, and it got published!

RAYEROSE is my music blog where I post tracks that catch my ear. It has been going for quite some time now and I really love some of the music up there. Check it out!

Music Production

I use Ableton Live as my DAW. I have an Arturia AudioFUSE sound card and an Arturia Analog Lab MIDI controller. My main mic is a SHURE SM7B. I play a Taylor 414CE acoustic guitar with a beautiful red finish.

I did a short music production course in Cubase on Atari computers. The basement at South Bank College was dusty and triggered my allergies. But, it was enough for me to buy a tower PC with a two-part soundcard that I could plug MIDI and mini jack into. I didn’t get anywhere with music production then, but that was how I started.

My friend Daniel James got right into music making on Linux. He showed me Audacity way back in about 2004, but again, I didn’t get anywhere with it. At some point, I bought a Mac Powerbook and Logic Pro. The interface was far too challenging for me, on that small screen, with all those pop-ups and that dark color scheme.

I finally got into Ableton Live in 2008. It still took me a long time to get good at it. But I persisted.

**update 4/5/21 – I bagged a deal on a pair of ADAM Audio F5 Studio Monitors. Incredible sound and clarity. I shelled out for a pair of ISO Acoustics stands, in order to get the best position possible in my little studio.

++update 23/05/21 – I grabbed an outboard synth! I found a second-hand (but nearly brand new) AKAI MINIAK Virtual Analog Synthesizer but I am still getting used to navigating the buttons. It’s a lot of fun so far!

First photo is the cover of my Firewater EP on the groovy as fuck Bandcamp: Rachel Rose – Firewater EP The second photos is from my bank Plank and dates from about 1992. The photo on the right is of me when I was collaborating with Anja Klove in the “Rose and Clover Project”. Below, you have a short “musician’s bio” that I wrote but never use as I really just make music for fun!

Rachel awakens the passion for human (r)evolution. Her simple, sensual and silvery songs slide between folk and spiritual pop – a fun and sexy dance towards consciousness.

Tech

Tech Baby Steps

I moved to London, England, and scored a job in the computer centre in Wimbledon Library. Quickly realising that my clients knew nothing, I RTFM and became somewhat of an expert on Windows 3.1 and 95 and MS Office. At that time, ux was definitely not a thing! It was all about the user and the “luser”, as in, if you didn’t know how to use a computer, you were at fault. We had a dial-up connection (modem!) when I started working at Input/Output Centres), although we soon installed ISDN and then – gasp! – a LAN.

Adventures in the WAN

INS/EDEX -> Cable & Wireless

INSNet/EDEX, our ISP soon recruited me. First off, I installed email accounts, soon moving onto DNS records and then, finally, leased lines. I learned UNIX and the shell, CISCO and TCP/IP routing and all sorts of fun stuff like HTML, CSS, some Perl and PHP and etc. It amazes me to remember the first time someone talked about “Google”, or blogs, or Youtube! We were acquired by Cable & Wireless and the transition was terrible. I worked 80-hour weeks, carried an on-call pager, and burned out.

Pilot Network Services and DIGEX/Worldcom

Moving up the ladder with jobs at Pilot Network Services (R.I.P.) and then DIGEX/Worldcom, I took on Sun Certification and became a CCNA. The Dot-com bust burned me out, and also my mum died, and 2001-2003 wasn’t a happy time for me.

Wellness

Here is where wellness comes in. I had been a conscientious eater (vegetarian, organic) for over a decade already. I had worked in Health Food stores. I received acupuncture and massage. After my mother’s death, I decided to study massage. It was clear that I had skill.

Massage

I studied massage, Manual Lymphatic Drainage, Nutritional Therapy and Hatha yoga. I am super chill, happy inside, with a clear mind and healthy body. This was my long sabbatical and healing. I always believe that my analytical mind has served me well as a therapist. I am not woo-woo, and I pay attention to detail. We all know, now, that humans need to be whole within in order to function well in work, society and at home.

Yoga

You can see me in action on my Youtube channel, Alteayoga. I have been practising yoga since 1999, and teaching since 2011. I gave up teaching group classes (like herding cats!) but am working on a Coaching program that integrates creativity and personal development for women. Watch this space.

Back on the Code Again

Tech never went away. Before I moved to Spain, there was a time at which if you Googled “massage London”, I was top-ranked! I love to delve into the backend, hack HTML, CSS and PHP, maintain my own web sites and LAN and got very good at Open Source tools like WordPress, Softaculous, Inkscape, GIMP and LibreOffice.

So, now I am working through the freeCodeCamp curriculum, and looking carefully at the world of UX. I am blogging about my adventures in code, if you’re interested.

** Update: I signed up for the Google/Coursera Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design. So far, I love it!

There are good things about getting older. One of them is: Wisdom. It took me so long to get to where I am now. I am 100%, certifiably, reliably, unquantifiably me. Thanks for visiting.