One of the first computers my family owned when I was growing up was the Apple ][+. This computer was the most open computer you'd ever want. It was a hacker's dream. It came with a schematic of the circuit of the whole computer, in case you wanted to invent things for it or just modify it somehow. No, really: People used to pass around ways that you could solder in jumper wires on the motherboard to make it do some new trick. [more]

One of my favorite app interfaces for creating music on a touch screen is that of TC-Performer by Bit Shape, which has been around for close to 7 years. Bit Shape's app collection is the creation of Kevin Schlei, currently at the Peck School of the Arts, in Madison, WI. [more]

Playing with a lot of things tonight, but I'm still far too disorganized to be productive. I ended up just dabbling with NodeBeat by Scitta. It's one of a class of apps that make fuller use of an iPad's touch interface to manipulate things that relate to the sounds being produced. In this case, you drag nodes around that connect to beat generators, which trigger as soon as a signal connecting them arrives. The way you set up the geometry determines how the music comes out. [more]

It's something of my goal to try to create at least one recording per day. Or at least on average, but I need to keep myself on a short leash or I'll let months go by without realizing it. (Why is this so hard to notice when you're doing it?)

The rule is: anything. Scream into a tape recorder, done. Make a 24-track masterpiece, whatever.

Part of it is to encourage recording fluency, where recording becomes so natural I don't give it any thought. Like how programming is for me now. Another part is learning about the tooling, and then lastly, actually exploring the space of possible recordings. [more]

Ok, time to make some noise.

Perhaps I should introduce myself: Hi, I'm Jeff. I used to make a lot of music on old analog equipment in the '80s and '90s, then life kicked in, and I fell out of the habit of recording music for a couple of decades. I kept playing, mostly piano, and collecting various bits of equipment, in preparation for getting back into recording, but the state of music shifted a lot, and I feel I have to spend some time letting myself just mess around until I'm back in the groove. [more]