On Saturday night me and my buddy spent a full 2-3 hours scratching our heads trying to figure out the best way to get rails lined up precisely. We settled on using an existing module I have assembled into a set of spare short rails. Perfect! No, it was not perfect. Turns out there were just enough slop contributors in that method to hose us. Mainly, I shouldn't have used a module with forgiving…
Monday night, I found myself watching clips of David Lynch movies with my wife and sister-in-law. I don't ever plan to make movies and I don't make art that's in his zone, but Lynch is a profoundly inspirational artist to me. His intuitive approach narrative to visual composition to everything, really, feels liberatory for me. Historically, my instinct when making anything was to come correct with…
My excuse is vacation and having young children. That's why I've ignored my weekly reminder to write something here for a month. Since February, I've roped my good friend Matt into helping me build a replacement / upgrade for my Blackhole 7U60HP case. Matt's good at woodworking and about seven years ago helped me build my beautiful and treasured baritone telecaster, so I figured, how hard could…
I should write something longer to help organize my feelings about the Norns because it feels messy, but I don't have time for that now. Norns rocks Norns forever and also I feel like I'm forever like 3 days away from abandoning ship and buying a Ditto X4 to replace the Norns. Long story short, it turns out that when you're playing with another person, it gets harder to work around the un-sanded…
Usually I write at work, but down time has been limited, so I've been writing less. Today I'm writing a short thing about how valuable stepping away can be. I'm working slowly through a new release I'm calling Lucky and Blessed. The first two tracks came together really well, really quickly, and felt good. The third track, I banged my head against for like three nights in a row. I'd complete rip…
A little less than a month ago I posted about how I was procrastinating by starting what felt like a simple project to create a Raspberry Pi based Jukebox thingy for my studio space to play my bespoke "Jukebox" Plex playlist. Just a little box with two buttons and two lights to just turn on a playlist I like and let it run while I'm working. How hard could it be? Well, now, with the exception of…
Quick update on my last post which you read here . Mostly the update is that I was wrong! I was all wrong about the leakage current thing. I replaced the JFET and the diode and no change which got me back on tracing the whole circuit. Turns out I had neglected to check the amplitude of the delayed signal directly on the far side of the DC blocking cap on the output of the compandor. When I did…
I've had a DOD585 on my bench staring at me for like two months. A local friend asked me to see if I could fix it and I'm always confidently raring to debug stuff right up until the time comes to disassemble and cook at which point I'm always finding reasons not to start. But now I've started and now I'm mostly finished. The problem was, when the pedal was on, the signal went to zero when you…
I should be dedicating most of my free time to finishing the two albums I've got more or less on a downhill slope to completion, but because of creeping creative anxiety, I'm putting off progress in favor of a little project. In the process I've taught myself a tiny bit of FreeCAD, so it's not procrastination. A topic for another post is my obsessive management of music media via my Plex server.…
I'm a relentless nerd, always tracking what I'm listening to, thinking hard about what I like and why I'm picking what I'm picking, trying to thread the unc needle. I'm making more peace with being a little out of touch but I don't want to just sit in my pigeonhole. I miss Tiny Mix Tapes. Anyway, here's five records released so far this year that I've really loved. Hecker - Natural Selection…