July 21, 2026
This is a very fun slidey thing to play with, from January of this year. Another ingredient in my never-ending Slider Rays piece.
Ben McAllister - Latest Posts
Seattle-based Guitar/Composer/Programmer
Latest posts
July 20, 2026
This is a fun little exercise that forces me to start slow and work my way up to speed. I think I'm feeling the metronome above 80 bpm, but I'm not!
July 19, 2026
The worst night of insomnia in a while. I tried to play my way back to bed. I wrote this to my writer's group: The man woke up at 3am, dull heat coursing through his veins but refusing to escape through his porous skin holes. He sat up in bed, spine straightening in time to his heartbeat. This is a new kind of pulse, bigger than he felt three years ago, when he was last adrift like this. That…
July 18, 2026
Am I keeping the pulse on this guy? I hear, play, let my thumb take over with the pulses, and things drift a little. In the moment it feels tight and hypnotic.
July 13, 2026
C'mon C'mon in the studio at Eric Eagle's, a marathon day recording... 11 songs I think. No audio of this yet but coming soon.
July 12, 2026
C'mon C'mon finally playing again for people.
July 11, 2026
Jacqui and Wyatt rockin it at the Bilstad's backyard summer concert.
July 09, 2026
Finally playing Theme again. I can't believe how much I'd forgotten about this tune - took me a day at least to get it back into my corpus.
July 08, 2026
Sean's tune Dirty Little Secrets - everyone thought this was super-proggy, and the proginess was solely my doing. Guilty. Here's me being a control freak at the top.
July 07, 2026
Office Song - 1st time in 15 years or so. Such a good one.
July 06, 2026
Starting the C'mon C'mon reunion practices. Just feeling so grateful for these friends.
July 05, 2026
For the first two weeks of July, we're getting my beloved band C'mon C'mon back together, prompted by brother Robert making the trek out west from Ashville. Most of the journal centers around that this month, but in the background is another project - I'm working through an arrangement of Leo Kottke's beautiful piece... let's call it like this youtube poster did: (Formerly) Four Cents. Many little…
July 04, 2026
Fireworks. Our new Olalla neighbor spends > $10,000 a year to fire a 1/2 hour display just downhill from us.
July 03, 2026
Civil disobedience in Pioneer Square - a demonstration against Hilton. Challenging beats made it very attention-getting.
June 27, 2026
Leesa was listening to this while we were having morning coffee and it scared the shit out of me. Brave woman! What would I have sounded like if a Grizzly Bear was chasing my dog and I.
June 20, 2026
Next month C'mon C'mon gets back together, and I'm listening to old rehearsals and demos. Man David's tune Subterranean Retail is a fun ass song to play. The crosstalk in the guitar and Sean's keyboard is key - don't forget Ben. I miss writing with these fellas so much.
June 19, 2026
Next month C'mon C'mon gets back together, and I'm listening to old rehearsals and demos. I used to think Sean's tune Photographing was tough to solo over, and I never dug the version that made it on our first record, but I like this one. Note to self to emulate this.
June 18, 2026
June 17, 2026
June 16, 2026
June 15, 2026
Happy birthday Dalila! I miss that kid so much. Art by Ella, who I bet also misses Dalila so much.
June 14, 2026
A little field recording. Art by Ella.
June 13, 2026
June 12, 2026
We saw the Lemon Twigs last night, which ruled. This is more than a minute. Such solid vocals on every song - they absolutely nailed it.
June 11, 2026
June 10, 2026
June 9, 2026
Getting back into my practice routine, there's much noodling happening. My left hand really hurts rekindling my love for those Villa-Lobos Etudes MAN, but SG is still very comfy as you hear here. Looking at old guitar mags is so grounding for me for some reason. Hey it was Steve's birthday on the 6th (6/6/66 I think?) - happy bday old friend.
June 8, 2026
Cmon Cmon is getting back together in July - we had our first "what are we going to do" conversation on today, so I've been listening through the archives for sessions we might add to to finish our lost 2nd record. I barely remember this tune, which didn't get fully finished, but I dig Robert's drumming and the attempt at thick backups. It was Dalila's graduation from HS today - what a trip! We…
June 7, 2026
I'm back after a long break and layoff. I'm working on new recordings of Guitar Cult pieces, focusing on Land Bridge Approach right now. Here's section C. This is so fun to play - but like I was saying yesterday, is much more fun against two other humans rather than a metronome.
June 6, 2026
I'm back after a long break and layoff. I'm working on new recordings of Guitar Cult pieces, focusing on Land Bridge Approach right now. There's a way different feel playing against a metronome versus listening to the other two parts. The metronome sounds so plodding to me here - no in-the-pocket feel like we have in the room. I'm posting this one (the opening) and tomorrow's post for reference.
June 5, 2026
From January 7, 2026 : The return of Car Ride Adventure from post 28 . I had to see how stem separation would deal with the vocoded effect on the TE PO-35.
June 4, 2026
From March 12, 2024 : Found this discarded sketch on the op-1. Maybe I'll update this with more to say tomorrow. I got a lot off my chest today outside of the music. This whole house thing is driving us crazy but we'll get there.
June 3, 2026
From May 3, 2025 : A little piece from a recording of yesterday's string changing.
June 2, 2026
From November 2, 2025 : Good times this weekend working some kinks out of Thuja by resuscitating some old beat juggling code. I like the double-kick feel in this one.
June 1, 2026
From March 15, 2025 :
May 31, 2026
From February 16, 2025 : Getting ready for more duo rehearsals with the drummer Neil Wilson and reconvening with Guitar Cult for recording. I found a raft of great rehearsals for a Chapel show from 2023. We'll be picking this thread back up as a duo, Neil and I–here are some spots that work.
May 30, 2026
From March 14, 2025 :
May 29, 2026
From March 10, 2024 : About 10 years ago I was working in an old industrial building in Ballard, listening to the sound of hammers on floorboards in the office space above mine. It was quiet so I caught the hammering clean, and it always reminded me of the opening of Boogie With Stu off Physical Graffiti . Here it is beneath one of my Circular 4Track sketches. It's a dark mood tonight.
May 28, 2026
From October 6, 2025 : A tiny change, but finally a working live coding example for Thuja. I feel unblocked now on finally making some noise about my little comp library.
May 27, 2026
From July 12, 2025 : Clip from something I titled "Moment", a Circular 4 track recording from 7/2023.
May 26, 2026
From January 28, 2024 : The Pocket Operators can do so much - the Speak is my favorite.
May 25, 2026
From October 12, 2025 : I was surprised when I heard how decent the sampled guitars sounded in this clip . Another starting point for realtime. I should start naming these - the last few days have either been a piece I called "Between Pržnjak and Trstenik" (these are islands off Korcula in Croatia) or little examples I put in the Thuja repo's examples folder. Snappier titles? Definitely there are…
May 24, 2026
From March 1, 2024 : VCS3 vs Ebows on VERY cranked guitar, stroking the strings and leaving a harmonic behind, to be magnified by an ebow. I gave notating it a stab. One of those techniques I found by accident, and still need to explore. Lightly rubbing a wound string with your fingertip only generates a little bit of sound energy - you need a ton of gain for this to work, so I should give it a…
May 23, 2026
From July 6, 2024 : The ol minor 6 -> 5 in the melody. It's hard not to hear DJ Shadow Stem off Entroducing every time I hear that move in a melody, but not everyone hears (or thinks) the same. In computer music class at UW, I had a classmate nail a point that boiled down to "not everyone's set of references is the same", but he literally said "you can't think like me - no one thinks the same". I…
May 22, 2026
From October 16, 2025 : Thuja realtime practice - shaping these textures that come from randomly indexing into longer recordings of ebow'd guitars. I make a minute long sound file, one for each of the twelve pitches, and spend each minute playing that pitch as many ways as I can on guitar, but constraining it as I see fit - here, it's only played with Ebow. "Randomly indexing" means the code picks…
May 21, 2026
From August 25, 2024 : From April 4 : I forgot I'd made this drum track to practice this study with. It's called Shifts, and if you notices the lines in the notation, you'll see why. I can barely play it at this tempo. 5 days without guitar practice time today, so I'm pining for my studies. Next week promises some relief.
May 20, 2026
From August 18, 2024 : From March 8 : This pattern was written on night 2 with no sleep 11 years ago almost to the day, about 3am (my orig recording is Memo 2013.03.01-EndlessLoopTuktu.mp3). Creating something angular that sits in one position and can be looped. Voivod show last night was amazing. Got to meet Away briefly and talk to Dan Mongrain (Chewy) for a bit. They both thought they'd met me…
May 19, 2026
From August 29, 2024 : From May 29 One little addition to yesterday's notebook page. The middle voice starts to expand and permute.
May 18, 2026
From August 22, 2024 : From March 18 For the last 5 years I've been obsessed with writing pieces for my group Guitar Cult - lots of pieces for either 3, 4 of 6. We've been on hiatus since fall, probably getting back to it at the end of summer, but we're going to get together and run our set next week, and it's got me revisiting a lot of unfinished work. I cranked so many demos out for us–I haven't…
May 17, 2026
From November 17, 2024 : I watched a video on youtube where the comment is made that the EP-133 is a modern SK1 - easy, immediate and flexible. I love this little machine and this video made me relearn the sampling workflow.