8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: making music

Chapter List

  • Play Time Updated · v2

    In my continuing efforts to learn to properly make use of the eclectic collection of music equipment that has arrived in tiny boxes to my front door since the year began, I have been playing.

    Literally. Figuratively. Philosophically.

    Playing.

    Isn’t it funny how we use the word “play” to describe the art of making music… and then we also use the same word to describe the act of having fun un-driven by specific goal or focused purpose? Play. I have been playing in both senses, making music in my office-turned-music-studio and also having fun generating soundscapes and beats and little songs un-driven by any specific timeline or objective save learning the tools themselves. It is both kinds of play because I am playing music but I am also just playing, dabbling, engrossed in a pointless, unfocused effort.

    Kids play and we smile and say that’s just what kids are supposed to do.

    Musicians play and we queue up to buy expensive tickets to listen.

    Average people sitting in their basement play and we, all too often, ask why.

    Or worse, we frame it up as part of something with a goal or attached to an effort to better ourselves. We try to justify it. We try to make it into personal growth or an abstraction set within the structure of a bigger learning plan. We rake ourselves across the coals with value-based evaluation of the time, log minutes, write articles on obscure websites about how “playing the piano for twenty minutes a day made me better at business-to-business marketing, blah, blah…”

    At some point as we turned from children into adults play became a pejorative.

    Real men don’t play, they strategize, practice, gamble, or hone their skills, right? I’ve heard that one before. There’s serious work to be done, money to be made, networks to build and projects to milestone.

    Nearly every day, for at least the duration that it takes to lay down a three minute track on my recorder I just play, I string together all the pieces with all their snaking wired connections, and dive in without a plan. It usually takes me a few tries, but often I get a respectable starter loop going on the looper pedal, I lean into an effect, and I start adding layers and layers and layers. Each day I come up with something new and interesting, and each day I record it because… well, why not? 

    Look, my point isn’t some secret layer here. Playing doesn’t make you a better person any more than it makes you a worse one. It makes you just a person to flit and flounder through curiosity-driven noodling. It makes you simply human to dabble without structured goals. 

    But it is all nothing more than play. Just play.

    Not always. Not for everything.

    Maybe now and then, or even once a day.

    And that’s okay.

  • MIDI Controller Updated · v2

    I bought a dedicated MIDI controller. I capitulated to the lure, the artists yearning, the insatiable feeling deep down in one’s gut that nudges us all towards the black hole of equipment investment. 

    It was the itch.

    Look, the keyboard was not an expensive purchase. But neither is it a toy. It is merely a very basic and simple twenty-five key plug-and-play input device that has piano ivories (instead of numbers and letters.) MIDI controllers make no sound of their own, rather sending electronic signals to another device like my laptop and act as if I was typing musical notes. It’s a musical instrument-shaped interface for a computer, and a kind of soft synthesizer.

    Creativity is sometimes about logically unjustifiable exploration and investment.

    I am far from an expert on keyboard technology.

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

    Also, I quite enjoy synth music.

    Growing up we didn’t have a real piano or a fancy digital one and we definitely did not have a synth. We had a bog standard department store brand electronic keyboard with a couple dozen built in digital 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 then 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 the family of a decade of The Kid doing her piano lessons. In other words, the concept of a bed of black and white keys that makes sounds? That was pretty clear in my head. But I’m no expert.

    What I was, rather, was curious.

    For myself, those pianos were never quite what I wanted… what I was craving, musically speaking. I would noodle and try to learn the basics, of course, but it the tools I had access to never scratched the itch that I was feeling in my musical soul.

    Curiosity untethered to practicalities can lead to expensive places. It is the aforementioned equipment black hole. I have seen countless videos online where the recording studio is a room overflowing with more tools and toys than I could hope to accumulate if I were to work at it for the rest of my life as a full time job. These people are not wrong in chasing new investments in their hobby, of course. It is curiosity that brought most of them there. It is that itch to find the next thing that is going to satisfy the creative urge.

    We all do it, too. Photographers buy lenses. Artists buy brushes. You should see my mother-in-law’s quilt fabric collection. 

    I recently came across the example of Trigger[1], Willie Nelson’s famous guitar. “There are instruments older than Trigger, but few guitars have logged as many playing hours in a lifetime, and Nelson plays hard.” That is to say, there are a lucky few who find their tool and cling to it without variation. I’m sure Mr. Nelson owns more curious equipment add-ons and eclectic musical do-dahs than most, but famously he is a one-instrument musician. But now the important question: Did he get there on the first try? Or did it take him experimentally buying and upgrading and testing and tossing?

    I first went down the synthesizer rabbit hole in early 2025. A proper synth is more than a piano keyboard that makes funny sounds. And it is arguably better than a MIDI controller plugged into the software on my laptop. Rather it is a dedicated instrument engineered to generate and manipulate sounds with electrical hardware, and for which a piano-style keyboard is merely a comfortable and familiar user interface. The one I bought one rainy day that spring was my first synth, and I’d be lying if I told you that I’ll settle for it as my last…well for any other reason than budget. I’d love to buy a selection of them and dabble and poke and play and experiment. I’d love to fall into that equipment black hole until I find my Trigger. 

    The new MIDI controller is another step around that 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. I am searching for something that I won’t know until I find it. It is a search for the scratch for that itch.

  • Good Vibrations

    The little speaker that I bought for roving musical adventures has a quirky side benefit—or, at least, a curiosity that has yet to become annoying.

    Regular readers may recall that I picked up a little battery powered five watt pocket amp with a bluetooth speaker and a quarter inch input jack. Specifically, it is the Positive Grid Spark Go (not an endorsement, just a side note) meant to be plugged into an electric guitar but simultaneously useful for both an aspiring electric violinist and his semi-regular synth jam sessions in the park.

    Then too, I threaded the output from my MIDI controller keyboard from the weakling computer speakers directly into the amp, so that when I sat down at my desktop in my home office to practice  I could make use of the richer sounds from the new speaker.

    It’s not great for more natural piano sounds, but as I explore the extensive instrument library that came bundled with the MIDI controller I have been building a collection of favourites that are a few standard deviations from natural—hybrids and bells and strings intermingled with raindrops—and many of those have rich bass ranges.

    The Spark Go has an interesting feature for a little speaker. If you lay it down on its back it has a bass pad that acoustically enjoins the surface of whatever it touches—the table or desk, in my case—and adds an audible and physical dimension to said surface.

    All that is to say, that when I’ve been playing bass heavy instruments on my MIDI controller and the speaker is on the desk the whole thing rumbles with a tactile joy that brings the music to life from and then right back through my fingertips.

    Curious technologies lead to simple joys.

  • Sound Filling

    Another equipment confessional. 

    I’ve been making music for well over a year now, and having stocked my makeshift studio with a growing list of instruments, audio interfaces, microphones, pedals, and other acoustic accoutrements I am almost ashamed to tell you I’ve been patching it all through an aging set of old computer speakers.

    For a while I had an old stereo amp plugged in and was routing some of the sound through that, but it became a bit of a hassle and we did some basement remodelling that borked up my configuration.

    And then, as I posted about recently, I found myself in the park one summer afternoon with my little synth and pair of headphones, and I was thinking about just how mellow that feeling was, specifically the portability of it and… well, long story short, pocket amps were on sale last week and…

    I realize all too late that the hobby equipment rabbit hole is deep and deceptive.  

    I picked up a little battery powered five watt pocket amp with a bluetooth speaker and a quarter inch input jack, and even now I’m wondering why I am sitting at a computer typing when I could be plugged in to some music making outside in the park.

    I feel a little guilty for buying yet another toy for my profitless endeavours, but alas, life is too short for bad speakers at the end of your signal chain, huh?

  • Saxo Phone

    I remember the day in the sixth grade when the band teacher from the junior high school came to our elementary school and assigned instruments: I was rocked to find out I got to learn to play the alto saxophone.  I don’t know how I landed it. It was the coveted beast of the band, and I had rolled a Natural 20.

    That was, hot damn! Forty years ago!

    I still have my original saxophone. It’s not a high quality instrument by any means, a simple student model Yamaha, but its my first and only. I’ve replaced the corks over the years and bought a new mouthpiece (apparently they go sour, who knew?) and it has (sadly) sat in a corner in the house idle for a very long time: decades. 

    I tell people in my orchestra (where I play the violin) that the saxophone was a stepping stone for my amateur musical career: I could read treble clef so I only needed to learn the instrument when I took up violin at forty, not learn to read music, too.

    It’s mostly the truth. 

    As it was my experiences during that era—in band and junior high school and keeping up with the practice required and a long list of other tween drama—soured me long before my mouthpiece went bad. It was a kind of low grade creative trauma and avoidance, and the thought of performing as a saxophonist has left me thinking I must harbour some residual subconscious vibes of aversion and recoil.  

    Even so, something compelled me the other day to pull the saxophone out of its case and ensure it was still playable.

    It needed a new neck strap, but otherwise (and to my surprise) together we could still make a few reasonable tunes emerge from this brass-hued beast.

    I don’t think I’m getting the band back together, but maybe I’ll keep a reed at the ready in case I decide to jazz up some musical therapy in my basement.