Under the Milky Way

And "the 4-hour rule" -- a universal law first discovered (or at least named) by guitarist Travis Hartnett.

I was in a band called the “Steve Ball Roadshow” from roughly 2004 - 2011 that contained two Travii: one Metcalf and one Hartnett. The first Travis, Travis Metcalf was an excellent guitarist who moved to Seattle from Portland in the late 90s to work with the Seattle Guitar Circle. Travis Hartnett was also an excellent guitarist who moved to Seattle from Texas to work with the SGC. I first met the Hartnett version on a Guitar Craft course in 1995 in Gandara, Argentina.

From 2004, we were a trio working to orchestrate songs and instrumentals for three guitars, harmony voices and textures. And we recorded a large chunk of 2003’s ‘Steve Ball Box Set’ together, a semi-ludicrous, 3-CD, 45-song release of all new songs + arrangements.

One of the instrumental pieces we arranged was called “Milky Way” and this is the (recently remixed) version:

With recent intergalactic and earthly events, this song still seems strangely relevant 22 years after its initial release.

And one more useful note about Travis Hartnett: he is one extremely wise and funny MOFO. In addition to being musical, he is deeply practical and insightful. For the past 20+ years, I have remembered and used a Tiny bit of wisdom Travis shared back in the late 90s regarding how well humans estimate the time for task completion.

He called it “The Four Hour Rule.” And, I have thought of this thousands of times since he coined the phrase. I also experienced this (again) earlier this week.

Here is the “4-hour rule” in Travis Hartnett’s own words:

“I really had to dig to recall the Four Hour Rule, which is that any problem that can't be solved immediately takes four hours to resolve. The exception is those that take two four-hour sessions, a day or more apart (usually linked to needing to acquire a physical part).

A corollary is that any given problem's non-free solution will cost $1000, or multiples thereof.“

Sadly, the 4-hour rule also applies to this Substack post. Here’s what happened:

1. I heard our 22 year old SB Roadshow version of “Milky Way” fly by on YouTube earlier this week, and I realized how much of the message and feel in this song ‘fit’ with the 3I/Atlas news I’d been tracking since we met scientist Avi Loeb in a zoom call back in November. Listening brought me to life.

2. I thought: I’ll just quickly find and remix this track to clean up some of the noisy JGB voices in the introduction. Mistake #1: I thought, “this might take all of ~20m.” Also: this task will help me practice and continue to templatize the TOM song release pipeline that will open up to the public in March. Ha!

3. Four hours later: I had remixed the song, and I’d made a simple video to replace the crappy static, badly-scanned cover-art video that CDBaby auto-spams onto YouTube with their digital distribution packages.

This was yet another excellent and visceral example of Travis Hartnett’s 4-hour rule, proving itself to be universal and unavoidable again.

Q: what are some stories or examples where you have also encountered the 4-hour rule?

PS - I’ll eventually remix all of the SBBS tracks including the vocal version of this song that has never been released outside of the Redbook CD format.

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