It’s been awhile since I’ve taken the time to sit down and record anything, but after listening through a few of the tracks that Erin and I put together awhile back, I’m feeling guilty about all the time I could have spent working on new stuff.

We’d managed to work a few riffs into full tracks by passing them back and forth in a photoshop tennis style, adding a new element or changing up the arrangement each time through. The approach is pretty flexible, welcoming quick bursts of creativity, and reducing emotional attachment to any specific section of a track.

Here’s a sample of two simple riffs we wrote as a starting point:

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And the (still unfinished) result after few passes:

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I’ve discovered that it’s a lot easier for me to write a 60 - 90 second group of samples than it is to finish any single track, but it’s still a lot of fun. I’m planning to sit down and write as much as I can in the coming weeks, so I’ll put up a page with all the little starter tracks that come out of it. In the meantime, here’s a sample of the last piece I worked on before my hiatus, hopefully it’ll evolve into something cool:

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Last week, Jessie, Shelby, and I traveled to Idaho to visit the White family homestead. We watched plenty of VHS footage of Jessie as a little chub, chopped 2+ cords of firewood from the local forest, and embarked on a remote wilderness camping slash mountain-biking extravaganza. Here are some photos from the trip.

Overall, it was a lot of fun but it’s good to be back home in our comfortable bed, and cozy wilderness-free apartment. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the outdoors, only that I’d rather not wonder if a wolf will pounce me on my way to the bathroom at 2am.

This blog has been the same for years (and I do mean years), with the last real post being published somewhere in mid-2006. After that, I would occasionally log in and update the publish dates so it looked like I was doing something blog-like.

Fortunately or unfortunately, nobody was really paying attention, so it worked just fine for me. Now that’s all going to change; I am making a habit of putting something at least semi-interesting up here so there will be some reason to visit more than once every 3 years.

At the very least, it’s a jumping off point to all the rest of the places I haunt the internets, and at best a compilation of various work or play related experiences including: music, travel, photos, videos, and the like. Please feel free to dig up my contact information and heckle me if I haven’t posted in awhile.