onfocus

I am mildly obsessed with the song Champagne Year by St. Vincent so I made a cover version with a guitar as vocals. ugh, the loose timing of everything in this was difficult to copy. But it was a nice musical meditation and challenge over the holiday break.

I really need to start naming these. This is another 60 seconds of layered guitars in GarageBand. This time in a major key so it's Tiny Major Metal.

I would like to announce that I have ended my business relationship with Spotify. That means I'm no longer paying Spotify $15/month for a family account. With Neil Young off the platform, they're literally removing the music I listen to most. Here's my 2021 Spotify Wrapped top artists list. (And keep the judgy looks to a minimum—we all got through 2021 our own way.)



I agree with Neil Young (and Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren and Brené Brown) that it's not good to support a company that refuses to remove public health disinformation.

Not everyone in my family plays their carefully curated Neil Young playlist 24/7 so they weren't as eager to jump ship. We all agreed that moving to a new service was good, but we couldn't agree which service to move to. We rarely sit down and put together our technical requirements for a digital service as a family. So we assembed our RFP and we're waiting on the contracts from Procurement.

In the end we found a music service from a company with no problematic stances: Amazon Music. I'm kidding, of course. Chances are very good that I'm going to want to leave this service in the near future and maybe that will be the environment we're in until there's real competition. Neil Young recommends Amazon and he has a deal that will give new users four months free.

The biggest barrier to moving services was moving our playlists. I found an app for that that works well: Free Your Music. It costs $15, but I look at that like a moving services tax. Hopefully that's a one-time fee. I had 30+ playlists to move over and I've only found a few mismatches here and there that were easy to fix.

If anyone else is a hardcore Neil Young fan it's worth checking out his Neil Young Archives website. (Thanks for the gift subscription, Dad!) The central music services are kind of like fancy spreadsheets to me. They make navigating songs easy but treat all artists the same. Looking through the Neil Young Archives is more like rifling through a dusty trunk where there's all kinds of bizarre things to find. It looks like this:



Truly awful if you're trying to get something done efficiently. Awesome if you want to have a feeling of discovery. We have a lot of "efficient" experiences online and I think we could use more planned weirdness.

Anyway, Spotify is a good, efficient music service. They must view podcasts as the future of their business if they're willing to both be bad citizens and degrade their music offering to keep those listeners.

Sometimes I have insomnia and I get a little dorveille time. As a treat. And there's nothing like using this quiet time to make a bunch of noise layering electric guitars in GarageBand. I've found that making 60 seconds of instrumental metal is just enough metal before bed ™. I have three now which is a trilogy.




To be continued depending on my anxiety.

I have been known to doomscroll at all hours of the night. It's not healthy and I've been pretty successful switching to the iOS Books app for insomnia reading. (Recently enjoyed the encyclopedic rhythm of Revolution in the Head about every Beatles track.)

Sometimes visuals are a better distraction than reading and for those times I like pedalscrolling. Guitar pedals are just metal boxes. They modify the signal from an electric guitar to add distortion, reverb, compression, or dozens of other effects before the signal gets amplified. They house a circuit board and include switches and knobs to control the effect. Sure I'm in the market for guitar pedals so it is shopping, but I also appreciate them as objects. Some are hand crafted with baroque art between components. Some are mass produced and extremely utilitarian. Some play with both of those expectations. They're small user interfaces and this wide variety of design makes them fun to browse.

I recently collected a bunch of guitar pedal manufacturer websites so I could randomly scroll through some pedals whenever I need to:

• Abominable Pedals
• Beetronics FX Pedals
• Black Arts Toneworks Pedals
• BOSS Pedals
• Caroline Guitar Company Pedals
• Catalinbread Effects Pedals
• DigiTech Pedals
• EarthQuaker Devices Pedals
• Effectrode
• Electro-Harmonix Pedals
• Fender Effects Pedals
• Fortin Pedals
• Frost Giant Pedals
• Fulltone Pedals
• Jackson Audio Pedals
• JHS Pedals
• Keeley Electronics Pedals
• Lovepedal Pedals
• Magnetic Effects Pedals
• Matthews Effects Pedals
• Mojo Hand FX Pedals
• MOOER Audio Pedals
• MXR Pedals
• nature sound Pedals
• Neunaber Audio Pedals
• old blood noise endeavors Pedals
• Pigtronix Pedals
• Red Panda Pedals
• Shift Line Pedals
• SolidGoldFX Pedals
• Stone Deaf FX
• Strymon Pedals
• T-REX Pedals
• TC Electronic Pedals
• Tech 21 Pedals
• Walrus Audio Effect Pedals
• Xotic Pedals

I'm sure there are more, but this is a good start. Thought I'd share. Here's to less doomscrolling.