onfocus

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.

Dang, watching Cut Chemist work is like watching magic. The whole thing is amazing but if you can't watch the whole thing go to 6:45 and watch him building layers. One turntable!

And for old time's sake: Cut Chemist Suite by Ozomatli. (The nostalgia is strong with this one.)

Meditative GarageBand fun. Inspired to attempt this by my favorite version of this song by Groove Armada.

This was fun to noodle on over the last few months. I studied Ewan Cunningham's drums cover and played them on a midi drum pad over three tracks. I also watched HarryAndAGuitar's Breathe video several times to see how he played a few parts. Pretty quiet at the beginning so you'll have to add your own heartbeat and screams, sorry.