Even at 32, I’m still enamored by old video game music. However, I’m not obsessed with keeping them the way they are and can get behind reimagining them using new ideas and technology. We’re not restrained by 8 bits or limited space on a cartridge anymore.

Thus, I introduce Gamey Stew, a new collection of game remixes and covers.

I love technology. I especially love music technology.

I can now say I’ve totally been to the state of New York, as well as its eponymous island city (and Queens for a bit, too). All of the media I’ve ever seen about New York feels largely validated, although I never got above 60th Street, so the Upper Sides, Harlem, and The Bronx are still mysteries to me.

The new Logic Pro X is pretty awesome. A totally new coat of paint and a load of new features means that it takes some time to get used to it. I dig the new interface a lot, but I'm still learning its new quirks. Disappearing plugins and UI oddities keep me from being 100% satisfied with it, but I'm getting there.

It seems kind of dumb that the best way to keep up with my friends in person (excluding the obvious constant contact that social media provides) is to schedule events. However, most of us have jobs and houses and marriages and kids and hobbies and what have you. These things are high priority and “hanging out” often gets left by the wayside. Thus, scheduling friendship becomes important.

I’ve been reading through my sizable archive of posts on here (the majority of which came from my ~10 years spent on LiveJournal and are now private to protect all the people who I apparently had no problem with referring to by name all the time).

This is not too uncommon, as I’m wont to do this every, say, 6-12 months, reliving the nostalgia of my life using the most articulate record I know of.

I had been following Internet musician/gamedev, Mr. Whitaker Trebella, for a while on Twitter; firstly because of some sweet Logic improv session videos he had done, and more generally because of his excellent additions to the game music soundtrack world.

This app has a lot of negative reviews. Besides the “Settings” screen not actually making its own design and instead just iFraming the existing one, it’s not bad. Maybe it’s still super buggy or something?

Nothing to blog about really, so if you’re reading this, I apologize for the disparity between this space and greatness. Have a good day!

We have many computers at home. Between my wife and I, there're plenty of ways to surf the Internet, watch Netflix, and play computer games. However, not all computers are equal in power, and there're reasons to use one over another. This brings me to an on-and-off again struggle I've recently gone through, but ultimately succeeded at!, to put Windows on my 2011-era MacBook Pro.

A few weekends ago, I got to play guitar in front of complete strangers, most of which I did not interact with…except through song. Yes, I did another (paid!) gig, the opportunity of which was culled from that mysterious UCSD Musicians Referral List that somehow people find on the Internet and then use to possibly contact me via.

This is not an exciting post, unless you’ve been looking for more recent information modded onto some of the basic-info-about-me pages that lurk within this site’s confines. In the event that the slim, but possible, chance encounter described above is being made right now, then have two links: 1) About and 2) Music Studio.

An updating bug has been going around, and I caught it this morning, so both pages have many more of those helpful hyperlinks the web has to offer. The former, a little self-serving mixed with a little external-serving, directs you to some additional resources regarding me (and one other!). The latter is largely me updating a text database of musical gear with actual links to where you could either look up more information about them and/or purchase them for yourself, if you so choose.

I sold a lot of old musical gear last week. I had received most as gifts or hand-me-downs over the last few years and I was looking to make a little cash, so they had to go. The gear included a classic drum machine, a synthesizer module, a preamp, a hardware compressor, and even a large 61-key MIDI keyboard. In general, I never used any of them, either because I didn’t need them or they took up too much space on my desk (I’ll let you guess which is which).

Last weekend I did something I'd never done before: helped out at a programming workshop. My wife can say the same, cuz she came along and not only helped out, but was an excellent programming "student". I was really jazzed that she was interested and actually had fun.

There's this little project I've been working on for about, oh, a decade now. I call it "Dumeh". It's a modern (meaning it's probably a little too pop-ish, has a drumkit, and I wrote it in the 2000s) symphony in three parts (fast-slow-fast), and is in the key of Cm (I think!; not good at that kind of thing, actually). I'm working with a local union of musicians to get it performed and recorded all legitimate-like in the next few months, which I'm incredibly ecstatic about.

Since getting most of my albums up on Bandcamp earlier this year, I’ve checked the stats pretty much every day. BC keeps track of plays (partial and full), “buzz” (where people come from), and purchases/downloads. It’s in a nifty graph and you can see recent, all-time, and many intervals in between. It’s something I never got around to doing properly when I created a custom place to host my music, so I’m glad they’re smart and ambitious and can deliver something better than I’d ever come up with on my own.

Some really cool guy who does audio programming (among other things, I presume?) that goes by the moniker 0xFE made this really sweet musical notation API called VexFlow. By using a text-based language called VexTab, you can make graphical music staves without needing images!

So, it's been a looooooong time since I did any personal dev stuff. I used to spend a lot of time on web apps, making my own blogs and music database systems and the like. Somewhere down the line I just kind of...completely lost interest in maintaining any of it, let alone making new stuff.

So I dropped it all.

Nebyoolae – Stringing You Along

I’ve loved playing the guitar for nearly 16 years now. That’s more than half my life. Of course, once I became more well-versed with making music on the computer, using synths and samplers and sequencers, just sitting down to play and maybe record myself playing a solo acoustic guitar became less of an activity. Here and there I’d revisit it, but it’s hard not to play with multi-track sample power once you get a taste of it. I like the timbre of more than just the guitar! I also can’t play everything I can imagine!

Spurred on partly by a request I received several months ago and then delivered upon last weekend (more on that in a minute), I’ve made progress on the new album of music I’m working on. Solo acoustic guitar pieces are the theme this time, with the codename of “Stringing You Along” (until I can think of something less lame), and I’ve gotten about 60% of them recorded. It’s felt really good to just play the guitar a lot, and my confidence as a player is boosted considerably.

A friend of mine makes music. He makes great music. Melodic and unique and…vibe-y. One aspect of his compositional abilities takes on the form of something called Vir Heroicus. Listen below: