Music and Computers
Music Stuff
I love music, it's like air and water to me. I need it to survive.
A Personal Essay on Music
My relationship with music is deep and complex. I have a lot to say about it.
Music I've Created
A few songs to give you an idea of the type of music I tend to create on my own.
Listening with Dedication
Recently, I took a dozen people on a musical journey, one text; one day; one album at a time. Now you can take the journey too!
Panama Sound
This is the website for my boutique home recording studio, where I also blog. I am less restrained here, but I'm proud of the material—some long-form articles that I wrote over there. There's actually over thirty articles on various subjects there, representing quite a bit of information. Not all of it is marketing copy either. So check it out when you get a chance.
Panama Records
Right now, Panama Records is just a schwag shop, but at some point it may become the label arm for Panama Sound. I don't know yet. Becoming a label is a deep dive that is fraught with all kinds of stuff, and I'm not sure I want to do that at the moment. But DO get over there and buy a hoodie, tank top or t-shirt.
Computer Stuff
I came up in the age of the personal computer (PC). My father had an IBM XT Clone with a keyboard you could clobber someone to death with. He was fascinated by computers, as am I. I remember when my parents were separated, he lived in a warehouse with some friends. He brought his computer home from his office at Cedar Center. He introduced me to a game called Starflight. It was a procedurally generated universe, an open-ended space exploration game that fit on a 720-kilobyte five and a quarter floppy disk. The programmers of that day were incredible—they were probably coding in assembly to keep the program size down.
REAPER, My Digital Audio Workstation
I've been using reaper since 2018. Before that, I was using GarageBand to get down basic musical ideas back when I was trying to teach myself guitar and songwriting simultaneously.
REAPER Session Auditor
I vibe-coded a Lua script that keeps track of a lot of things while recording. It's a kind of digital black box recorder for sessions. Visit the project, clone the directory and put it to use in your tracking sessions.
REAPER Session Auditor on GitHub
Useful Applications
Stuff I use over and over again.
NOTE: Most of the software listed here is free. Or at least free to try with full-features.
Vim, tmux, git, iTerm2 for coding tasks. I'm wrestling with whether or not to ditch the command line for VS Code. The downside of VS Code is it's monolithic, opaque and heavy-handed. I like the neat little command line utilities that do one thing and do that one thing really well. REAPER for my digital audio workstation, Plex Media Server to listen to my own library of music—completely cut off and firewalled from commercial streaming services and their "algorithms". Darktable for photos, Inkscape to design logos and graphics. Tailscale which set up a private VPN for all of my devices.
Useful One-Liners
If you're doing it manually—you're doing it wrong.
One liners are elegant bits of commands and regular expressions. Harkening back to the days of assembly programming, when code was elegant by necessity. I try to save as many one-liners as I can, the good ones save so much time.