Over the past few years I’ve found myself gravitating towards portable music devices that I can fool around with while I’m drinking my morning coffee or have a few spare minutes during the day. I’ve never really been an iPad guy but I’ve been seeing some interesting apps pop up over the past few years and figured it was time to give it a shot.

When I started releasing sample packs via Wavparty, I wanted to put videos for the demo tracks on YouTube so they’d be easy to post and share. They, uh, quickly took on a life of their own. I get a lot of questions about how I make these things. Here’s what I use:

In 2020 I did Weeklybeats for the third time. Weeklybeats is a free community site where everyone attempts to write and record a new song every week for the whole year. In past years I would start out strong but run out of steam as, you know, life happened.

At this point in my life I’m usually able to read 2 or 3 pages of a book in bed before I fall asleep immediately. One nice thing about the past 6 months of lockdown is that there is absolutely nothing else going on and I’ve been able to do a good amount of reading! Here are a few books that I have really enjoyed (please be warned these are not smart people books):

Tomorrow marks the 6 month anniversary of my family (and a lot of us here in America) going into full lockdown mode. It has been a miserable and confounding experience that other people are better equipped to write about, but let’s talk about some good things. Here are three good things that kept me from totally losing my mind: