8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: making music

Chapter List

  • Broken Sounds

    I bought another guitar pedal.

    (Note to new readers. I do not actually own a guitar, but I do play either my synth or my violin through my pedals to “wet” the sounds.)

    My new pedal is a multi-effects distortion pedal. This means, putting aside the looper pedal (which has a very specific recording & performance purpose) I now have what I would call a matching set: one pedal that adds and a second pedal that subtracts.

    The new distortion pedal is subtractive. As I understand it, it passes the audio signal through its circuits and scrapes away some of the clarity of the signal by clipping or compressing or otherwise degrading the pristine sound emerging from the instrument before it comes out of the speaker.

    There is beauty in destruction of that sort.

    There is grit. There is abrasion. There is texture.

    In fact, having now acquired a device whose sole purpose is to erode the quality of what comes from another device, it has got me thinking about the role of destruction in a lot of my art, and the aesthetics of grinding away the perfection in favour of something that feels like it has been lived in. Used. Worn away with time and the passing of years. And not just that, but done so with the clash of random indifference only possible through authenticity. 

    How can one hope to recreate the beauty of erosion and the story of a million soft touches with a simple tool in a single day? How do you add grit to fiction? How do you age a photograph at the moment of the click of the shutter? How do you sketch abrasion?

    I can only begin to wonder.

  • Loop Jamming

    Have you noticed that the advice on the internet rarely leans into imperfection.

    Very few people are writing tutorials about how to just have fun.

    If you have been reading this blog you will long since know that my creative adventures into 2026 have swirled around creating music. I have played an instrument for forty years, but stretched my musical explorations more and more for just the last decade, taking up the violin about ten years ago, joining a community orchestra, and lately getting into synth-based audio explorations on my own. I’m a novice, but one with a big range: a large puddle, but not one that goes very deep—if you take my meaning.

    In attempting to deepen that knowledge I have been seeking instruction, often online, and what I find is that most everything leans into the idea that the end goal must be perfect: polished, honed and uniformly refined to gold standard. 

    For example, I have been looping: recording layered loops of sound (and noise) and voice and rhythm into all manner of interesting audio recordings. Some of them I’ve been publishing as a kind of podcast on this very site. They are rough. They are gritty. They have sharp edges. They are imperfect.

    Yet according to every piece of advice online my work has no value unless I strive for perfect.

    Use a DAW.

    Quantize your tracks.

    Set up your recording booth just so.

    Imperfection is the enemy… apparently.

    But I don’t want that: I have merely been jamming. Exploring. Feeling my way through the tools and making things that echo with a kind of imperfect delight in their moment of creation. 

    So here’s a piece of advice online: strive for imperfect, too. After all, it’s human.

  • Comic Sounds

    I am no musician. 

    I’m not trying to be humble, but merely to tell you that despite being moderately okay at three instruments, being able to read music, and having a respectable recording studio hacked together in my basement office, I am really just dabbling in what most people would consider proper musical creativity.

    And I’m okay with that.

    I am trying to learn, strapped for access to resources and time and patience, at least the kind granted to a guy in his late forties who most people feel should either already be good at this kind of thing or should stop “acting like a kid” and do something more serious than compose jittery jams in his pyjamas. 

    I used to recap an essay[1] I once read about the font Comic Sans. You know it. It’s the most hated font in the design world, the free comic-book-ish font that came with Microsoft Windows long ago and shows up on “fun” corporate posters designed by people who don’t design for a living. I defended that font: people who use Comic Sans, I said remembering that essay, are thinking about design. They are arguably, well, just not great at it… yet.

    They are no designers. 

    But they are trying…the same way I am trying with music, art, and a dozen other creative pursuits. And rather than make fun of anything designed with Comic Sans, perhaps we should be thinking of it instead as a teaching opportunity. We should be thinking of it as made by someone who’s mind is open to the possibilities of creative expression.

  • MIDI Controller

    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.

  • Play Time

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

    Literally. Figuratively.

    Isn’t it funny how we use the word “play” to describe the art of making music and also the act of having fun undriven by goal or purpose? 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 undriven by any specific timeline or objective save learning the tools themselves.

    Everyday, for at least the duration that it takes to lay down a three minute track on my recorder, I string together all the pieces with all their snaking wired connections. It usually takes me a few tries, but I get a respectable starter loop going on the looper, 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?

    But it is all nothing more than play. Play to learn, yes. But just play.