Minutes

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. Link to the post.

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. Link to the post.

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Happy birthday Dalila! I miss that kid so much. Art by Ella, who I bet also misses Dalila so much. Link to the post.

A little field recording. Art by Ella. Link to the post.

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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. Link to the post.

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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. Link to the post.

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 watched on youtube - the closest we could get to being there! Link to the post.

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. Link to the post.

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. Link to the post.

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. Link to the post.

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. Link to the post.

From May 3, 2025: A little piece from a recording of yesterday's string changing. Link to the post.

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. Link to the post.

From March 15, 2025: Link to the post.

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. Link to the post.

From March 14, 2025: Link to the post.

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. Link to the post.

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. Link to the post.

From July 12, 2025: Clip from something I titled "Moment", a Circular 4 track recording from 7/2023. Link to the post.

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? Definitely there are multiple pieces here. Link to the post.

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 w/a limited in the signal chain. Link to the post.

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 heard perceiving - "No one can perceive a thing the same" - and that's one of the reasons I'm doing this minutes blog. Not only do I perceive a sound in my own individual way regardless, I have a different perception of the thing over time. In particular, I may have a cringey experience with a sound I post, thoughts like "it's not done", "it's not perfect", "lazy", "too raw" etc, then one of you will say "I like that one, I want to know where it goes", or "can you share that file with me", and I'm left with the thought that I understand music even less than I thought I did. Takes me down a healthy notch. For me dying is when I stop learning, when I stop moving, so this is good. Link to the post.

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 a random spot (index) into the file and plays a tiny sample. These little clips pile up into the texture heard against the picked guitar part. Link to the post.

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 me before, and I think I did meet Away when they played the Offramp for Outer Limits. Maybe social media? Could hardly sleep. Now the weekend in Olalla, with a new improved battery for field recording. Link to the post.

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 for us–I haven't gone into my Guitar Cult folder for a while but there are definitely some overlooked gems. Here's a bit that was cut from our piece Land Bridge Approach, which my notebooks says was the start of another piece called Ascensions. Really hard to count and play, but a cool effect - I'll have to do something with this. Note to self: this is a session called Mists v1, when you were calling these phasing experiments 'mists'. Link to the post.

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 surprise element (I let my ear guide what I'm sampling into the loops, but am always unprepared for what I hear looped). There's also a filter that forms, a kind of boiling-down of the sound world I'm sampling, that has the scent of the original world but feels like another place at the same time. Hm. Link to the post.

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 and A on the low string of my guitar, where I control which frequency 'bins' are used in replaying the original. The "bins" here represent linear slices of the frequency spectrum, so you might play bin #3 from the analysis, and you only hear the original signal from 150-200 Hz. I assigned the bins to keys on my keyboard and improvised, then promptly forgot about the experiment. Soon I will process some coyotes, assign their songs to keys on my keyboard, and my dog will freak out. Link to the post.

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 to play with that. Here's a mix of a few moments of critical mass - still mellow yellow but, for me, it's the arrival point in each of these little unreleased recordings. This is Judas Priest graffiti Jason showed me up in Lynnwood which had been on the street since we were in high school. Link to the post.

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 night it didn't work, but Lenny Bruce, Mitch Hedburg, David Sedaris, Redd Foxx, Mike Birbiglia and Norm MacDonald all pitched in. I grabbed my guitar for a sec and played this little tidbit, wrapping it up today. Link to the post.

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 guitar for what feels like ages, so I'm revisting some old guitar posts. This is derived from part of post 99, April 8, 2024. Link to the post.

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. It induces a brain fog while I'm playing that I need to breathe to break through, so ultimately its kind of a breathing exercise. Link to the post.

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 your context? There are moments on Kill em All and Master of Puppets that shifted my musical point of view in the same way Stravinsky, Ligeti or Varese did. A new beautiful sound that I had never heard before. So much of it was tied up in the sound of their records - the production of Fleming Rasmussen on MoP in particular - that I have a hard time still resolving it with the drek they'd go on to make after that record. The entrance of the electrics + drums about a half minute into Battery is still one of my favorite moments. Here it is in a series of meditations on why I like the sounds they made. It got me reflecting on the different sounds from these first few records that have become part of my DNA - I need to figure out what I want to extract from them. So often in my guitar music I write something with a palm mute and a chunk gesture of some sort and think I'll evoke something like this sound, but not the case - I need to listen a bit more consicously, and maybe this cataloguing will help? Link to the post.

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 what-would-become Cmon Cmon, and about to start Wizard Prison with Scott and John. Link to the post.