Minutes

From January 28, 2024: The Pocket Operators can do so much - the Speak is my favorite. Link to the post.

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? D...

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 try...

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'...

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&q...

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. Link to the post.

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 m...

From August 29, 2024: From May 29 One little addition to yesterday's notebook page. The middle voice starts to expand and permute. Link to the post.

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 f...

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. Link to the post.

From July 9, 2024: Rabbit holed a bit into the Dave Brubeck archive tonight (THANK YOU DANETTE!). I hadn't broken out the Circular 4 track in awhile so here we go. There's a workflow emerging where I create loops w/the C4T then chop and splice in Live. It yields a headspace close to where I go when I'm tape pause composing, it has the immediacy (I make new material quickly) and a surpr...

From August 21, 2024: From March 26: Lotta motion in this one. I recorded this piecemeal and laid some quotes from one of my Circular 4Track cuts ("Pulse Drop 2s"). Today was one of those days where I'm socialed out by 5pm - playing lines like this ground and refuel me. I hope someone out there gives one of these a spin someday and get the same recharge I do. Link to the post...

From March 19, 2024: This filtering comes from using the PVOC utility and opcode in Csound. When I first heard this technique in Room 12 at the UW back in 1997 I was blown away. I had never heard anything like it and wanted to explore, but it took SO LONG to analyze long files to be resynthesized this way. I sculpted this sound from an old experiment (from 2004 wow) that analyzed me playing E, G a...

From May 21, 2024: I've been away from the Circular 4Track and thinking about what I want to change about it. The challenge I laid for myself was to reach some sort of "critical mass" in the loops I created with it, which a lot of times took.. time. In that time I lull the listener into mellow territory. I haven't been able to jump right into the critical mass, and I want...

From October 27, 2024: Tonight a got a little obsessed with this exercise. More fun playing this with a beat instead of metronome. Link to the post.

From August 20, 2024: from March 6: A little audio verité from Jason's place, layering guitars and more guitars. These zippy slidey lines are so fun to play - I'm glad I can fall into the pocket eventually. Here's me stumbling through making this up while Jace tweezes the sounds. Link to the post.

From December 6, 2025: As I do each year, I'm gathering composition seeds from old notebooks for my usual wintertime focus. These are bits from a file called '2020.03.25.Elec Improvs' - a bit of covid-era improv. Link to the post.

From August 24, 2024: From April 2 Big insomnia night last night as I ran inventory - aka monkey-minded - about all the things I think I must do. The chores required of us before we can move. The music I want to write but don't have time write now. On and on obsessive demons gnaw at my stomach until I can put thoughts to bed, usually with the aid of comedians in earbuds and 2 benadryl. Last ni...

From May 25, 2025: ESQ-1 + EP-133 - the EP-133 sequencer RULEZ. Link to the post.

From May 29, 2024: Number 150! I got a little obsessive with this, but got lazy writing it out. 1 cycle plays the the same scalar figure up and down the scale on E, F, G, A and B, then back down - it has 4 notes in the figure. The other, with 5 notes in the figure, goes up and down E, F, G and A, and the cycles just about meet up perfectly at the end. I haven't been able to sit and practice my...

From July 24, 2024: The old Articulations podcast theme. Maybe we'll relaunch one of these days. Link to the post.

From August 17, 2024: From Feb 18: Brainstorming parts to a tune Jason set up with the working title of loss, my hands we not warming up, so I rabbit-holed on this. This is one of 4 studies I wrote during a Satori moment in Boonville in 2006. For me, these pieces ground me and present new challenges whenever I pick at them. Today I decided to play with a straight boom-kat and not take any repeats....

From January 2, 2024: 4 days on the couch sick after 10 days without guitar practice. Link to the post.

From August 31, 2024: Metallica hit town just as we were heading off for 2 weeks in Croatia - Rob and Brian at work went, which sparked a whole conversation on what is good/bad metal from their blossoming and what constituted 'good' Metallica. They have been lost on me for decades, but there was a time when I heard sounds on their records that felt as.. what's the word for recasting yo...

From February 25, 2024: Another bit from Circadia. Three simple elements, a little bit closer to goal: trying to make something that sounded like a circle out of these little clipped acoustics. I was really excited about this at the time, but it didn't seem to catch anyone's ears except filmmaker Dan (thankfully). I had just quit Baby, was just wrapping Stupid Kids at the Empty Space with...