Outdated · v1 I’ve revisited this piece. This post is outdated. Read the updated version: MIDI Controller (v2) (October 21, 2026)

I broke, and I finally bought a dedicated MIDI controller.

It was not an expensive one. Nor is it a toy. It is, rather, a very basic and simple twenty-five key computer keyboard that has piano ivories instead of numbers and letters. It makes no sound of its own. It just sends electronic signals to another device, as if I was typing musical notes.

If you had asked me a year ago what I knew about musical keyboards I would have told you there were pianos …and electronic pianos …and—I am reluctantly admitting here that I hadn’t been paying much attention after that point. 

I like synth music, and growing up we didn’t have a real piano or a fancy keyboard, but rather a simple department store brand electronic synth with a couple dozen built in instruments. In our house now, my wife has (because it is hers from before we were married) a pretty nice digital piano in her office, and a little over a decade ago we acquired a small upright piano, too, which sits in our kitchen and serves little other purpose than to remind me of a decade of the kid doing piano lessons. But, the concept of a bed of black and white keys that makes sounds? That was pretty clear in my head.

For myself, those pianos were never quite what I needed. What I was craving, musically speaking.

Instead, I went down the synthesizer rabbit hole a little over a year ago now and learned that a proper synth is more than a piano keyboard that makes funny sounds, but rather a way to generate and manipulate sounds with electrical or digital tools, and for which a piano-style keyboard is merely a comfortable and familiar user interface. 

Now I’ve gone full circle. I own a small keyboard controller to interface with the synth software on my computers, and I am learning more about how it all works with each visit to this world of music and sound …and most importantly, a new personal exploration of audio creativity.

See, when I was in my teens and twenties I listened to a lot of punk and metal from the 80s and 90s. And I remember finding it odd that most music from these genres still usually followed the rules of popular commercial music design. 

I get it. Musical structure. Chord progression. Hundreds of years of music theory, blah, blah blah, but… think about it from the other perspective: these sounds and songs were supposed to be part of a finger-wagging, pearl-clutching anti-social revolution and a counter-culture apparently designed for angsty teens and rebellious youth to rage against the establishment.

But simultaneously they were entrenched deeply within that same establishment by the basic rule-following and formula-driven style of the music itself. 

There are certainly examples that don’t fit this observation, but from my viewpoint so much of it seemed to follow set standards: It was composed of phrases and verses, with lyrics, mixed into tracks of four to six minutes long that could be played on the radio. 

All of it—in the parlance of capitalism—written, recorded and packaged to be commercially viable.

And, sure, yeah, of course, no kidding, I get capitalism and working with the system and all that, too… but…

…but the real rebellion it seems was making something that was not for sale, and breaking the rules and standards that guide our creativity towards the end goal of becoming just another product that needs to move in lockstep with the rules, too.

But let me put this another way, and via an example…

As I noted previously on this blog, over the last year I have built up a pretty respectable sound production studio in my basement. Mics, amps, cables, a recorder, an effects pedal, a looper pedal, and of course my synth. All of it is more than enough to make something interesting.  

And despite that great setup, can you guess what I do when I get stuck creatively?

I go online and I start window shopping for more equipment. Maybe a drum machine. Maybe a pickup for my violin. Maybe a better synth, or… gulp, add to cart: cha-ching!

In my mind, in that moment, any of it, all of it would mean more freedom and opportunity to do more stuff with sound and music… sure.  

And yet another truth hits bone: none of it will do the work for me.

What I know in my heart is that I just need to sit in the seat and do the work, play the notes, speak the words, and… just create. But having too much freedom to keep looking for something better, something additional, something else—all of it is entangling the effort of actually doing the thing itself.

I’m boxed in by being unbound by opportunity to try something else, rather than just looking at my gear and reminding myself: this is what you get, now make it work.

Just make the damn thing and post it.

Share it.

Push it out into the universe.

Will people judge it, love it, hate it, mock it, share it? With they laugh, cry, ignore, overlook, steal, copy, complain, and all too often respond in a hundred other unpredictable ways? Yeah. Of course they will. Heck, humans are messy and there is always someone out there who will make you question your very participation, let alone the product itself.

But look what is out there already. Everything! Unabashedly shared, no matter the quality or purpose. And worse:

Are influencers asking your permission to post to your feeds?

Are politicians asking for your blessing to push propaganda?

Are companies asking if its okay if they inundate you with advertising?

Of course not! No one else is asking, are they? They are making and flooding and just filling every space with their products.

Meanwhile, you are sitting there wondering if you are good enough, or if that thing that you put your whole soul into will be well-received—or if maybe you will just be laughed at by some random loser in his mom’s basement (who by the way, mocks and laughs at everything because he is incapable of making anything but mockery). 

So make something. Make it great. Make it how you want. Just make and share and participate in this great creative experiment, and maybe we’ll collectively overwhelm the world with beauty and hope and curiosity instead of all those other things.

I was going to try not to stray beyond 200 words in any given post.

If I couldn’t get the idea out in two hundred, maybe it wasn’t honed enough. Maybe I was babbling. Maybe it should have been something bigger than a blurb herein.

But the problem? Every post last week was well over two hundred, the last one creeping up to nearly 300 words. 

Is that a bad thing?

Guardrails, even self-imposed ones can be important for the simple reason that creative restrictions often create a better product. In this particular case, volume was not my challenge. I know I can sit down any day and type-type-type out an essay-length post if I am so inclined. My challenge to myself and for the focus of this project was rather honing ideas to a sharp point, not muddling around in a big vat of chocolate-pudding-flavoured ideas.

What are your guardrails? Do you step over them?  And does it ultimately, honestly, make the result better? Or not.

Branched · Part One Continued in Creative Positive (Part Two)

I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.

Our feeds, all of them, are filled to the brim with algorithmically pushed trash.

Some of it is important. Some of if drives awareness of injustice and tragedy. Some of it sparks action and reaction. Some of it is vital to understanding the world, society and the universe.

But creatives have an important role to play too: positive balance. 

It is not our jobs to join the rage.

It is our job to balance it all out, to remind people that there is beauty in the world worth fighting for, and it is our job to maintain the flame of art and story and music and hope in a wasteland of anger and AI slop.

It is so easy as an artist to reject the darkness of these platforms and avoid them, and I have struggled myself, even recently, trying to understand my role there.

The way I see it? Our role is not to repost angry memes, or rant about authoritarian politics, or even rage against the machine. 

Rather, our role, the creative’s role, is to keep playing the music of humanity in all its forms and make sure when the dawn returns there is still a bit of our humanity left to remind us why we were fighting the darkness at all.

It was not my first.

It would not be my last.

But yet here I sit not having finished writing it. 

Sure, I made a plan. I sketched out the plot. And I got it about ninety percent of the way to completion, but then…?

Then I hit a wall.

Every morning, literally every morning, I wake up and feel guilty that I didn’t write another chapter in that novel the day before. Every morning, literally every morning, I wake up and part of me ponders if today will be the day that fact changes.

So far, no.

At the start of 2026 I resolved that just pining about standing in front of a metaphorical brick wall, a wall that I didn’t know how to climb over, or around or through was not the right approach either.

Instead, I started a new novel.

No. I haven’t quit the other one, rather I just need some more time to stare at that original brick wall and figure it out. But just staring at it wasn’t helping anything either. 

Each day I get another day further from my last effort on that story, but it is not forgotten.

And one day I’ll wake up, ponder if today, that day, will be the day… and I will be right.

I have been writing a new novel and I am at the point where I need to move from the start, the inciting action where all the characters are introduced and dive into the middle, the guts of the story where all the action and the bulk of the story is going to happen.

I did all this work on planning out a plot.

I did all this work creating characters.

I did all this work lighting the fire to make it all start.

And whilst I did think a lot about how the flames were meant to keep smouldering for the next couple hundred pages of real story, getting over that hump between the start and the middle, and putting it down into actual words on an actual page is turning out to be a bigger chore than I anticipated.

If you have been reading my meandering thoughts you know that I generally keep smouldering. I just push through and write my five hundred words each day, and (practically speaking) that’s how it goes down.

But the effort, the mental churn, the fight to keep going is different now that I’ve moved into middle where the real plot and real works takes more than just a big idea.

Start small.

Start with the achievable and work your way up.

I have been planning this novel-length audio production, writing words, making scripts, composing music, mixing sounds, and—nothing firm has been done yet.

The big project is simply too overwhelming.

Oh sure, I see the forest, but I can’t seem to plant the trees. It all feels like I’m jumping into a new plan, a new skill, a new concept without knowing if any of it will even work—and more importantly if something critical will fail. And the result is paralysis incarnate.  

Something smaller has to come first.

In my case, maybe instead of trying to make a novel, I record some audio blogs first. Then maybe after I do that, I work on making a few one-pager short stories into encapsulated one-off samples of what I’m hoping to create on a larger scale. And then, maybe something else, and something else after that, and maybe… eventually, the real thing will fall into place.

I’m sure many great people have achieved great things in one fell swoop… but the rest of us may need to build up our stamina first.

I’ve outgrown most such superstition, but I can’t help but think about this idea of “luck” now and then, especially so on those random Fridays that happen to evoke a bit of triskaidekaphobia in the lingering echos of my childhood.

I’ve been told so many times in my life that skills I’ve cultivated, talents I’ve practiced or knowledge I’ve acquired is due to some kind of lucky streak in my life. 

And maybe there was some luck.

Because, oh sure, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the privilege of my life, living in a western democracy in the twenty-first century as a European-descended man has played a huge role in the type and frequency of opportunities dangled out in front of me. But any numbskull no matter their privilege—and I’ve known a few—can fumble those opportunities and wind up in a very different creative space, or even completely outside of one.

Luck played a part, sure, but beyond luck some of that is not only what you make of the cards your have been dealt, the dice you rolled, or the coin you flipped… but what you put back into the system. 

It’s not luck to work hard towards a goal. It’s not luck to dream big. It’s not luck to share knowledge with others. It’s not luck to build community. It’s not luck to cultivate and to elevate voices. And its not luck to embrace something bigger than yourself and beyond the creative product. It’s more than luck.

And we should embrace more of that idea and make more of that kind of luck for everyone.