Trial run after rearranging some electronic doodads on my side desk, most notably the pictured Drone Stack and HypnoDrone from Kaiser Electrical Instruments in lovely Duluth, MN. Recorded at the end of a rare week-long ice event in north Alabama.

Listening back to this one, I was struck by a trio of mental images. The first was a memory from a flight back from some business trip. The clouds and the angle of the sunlight formed what looked like a blasted landscape over which towered…

More fun with plugins and MIDI controller.

The music is canned chords and patterns I pulled from EZKeys, then filtered through a plugin (Wires by AudioThing). The story comes from a silly cartoon a buddy posted on social media, followed by my addition about saltines. The last line is…

At the beginning of February, I tried to learn to use VCV Rack, but never really took the time to learn properly. Instead, I took the couple of patches I managed to create, slowed them down, mashed them up with drums and canned percussion from…

When I used to work third shift at Kinko's, I'd sometimes leave the weather radio on, and the automated voice and cadence (though different now from the one 20+ years ago) still has a comforting tinge of nostalgia. I have a weather radio on my…

Another go at trying out a new plugin or two.

As usual, the track titles have nothing to do with the actual music/sounds - I usually just pick something that fits with whatever theme/concept is in my head when it's time to get the cover art together. (This time around, it's power grid failures…

This December was more somber and complicated than usual, so just I threw some ambiguous chords into an old VCV Rack patch and didn't bother trying to track down or fix the discordant foghorn tone that crops up a couple of times. I wish I could…

It finally dawned on me that I could use the faders and knobs on my MIDI controller to control channel volumes and plugin settings in Reaper while recording live, so I fired up a bunch of instances of Hainbach's excellent Noises plugin, tweaked…