The Paper Roll That Plays Itself

 Plug a keyboard into a computer, press a key, and a piano sound comes out. It’s natural to assume the keyboard sent that sound down the cable. It didn’t. The cable carried no sound at all.

That’s the part of MIDI that confuses almost everyone, and once you see it, the rest falls into place.

It looks like a file format, but it isn’t

MIDI sounds like MP3 or WAV, a type of audio file. It’s not. MIDI doesn’t contain any sound. It contains instructions.

Think of the player pianos your great-grandparents might have had. They played music by themselves, fed by a spinning roll of paper with holes punched in it. The paper held no music, only directions: as the roll turned, the holes told the piano which keys to press, when, and how hard. The piano made all the sound. The paper just told it what to do.

MIDI is that paper roll, made digital. The name stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and it’s a shared language for describing a performance.

When you press middle C on a MIDI keyboard, it sends a tiny message that says, roughly, “This note was pressed, and it was pressed medium-hard.” Later, another message says “That note was released.” That’s it. Whatever is on the other end, a piece of software or a synthesizer, reads the instructions and makes the actual sound.

Why that distinction matters

A recording of a singer or an acoustic guitar is audio: a captured sound wave, baked in like a photograph. Because it’s a finished picture of the sound, changing it afterward is hard. If the singer hits a flat note, you can’t just grab it and drag it up. Specialized tools can fix it, but you’re reworking a recording, and push too far and it starts to sound strange.

MIDI is closer to the sheet music than the recording. Because it’s only instructions, you can change almost anything after the fact:

• Swap the instrument. Play a melody on a piano, click once, and it becomes a string section, a saxophone, or a futuristic synthesizer. The notes stay the same; only the thing playing them changes.
• Fix a wrong note. Move one note without touching anything else.
• Change the timing. Lengthen a pause, or speed up the whole song without it turning into chipmunks, since there’s no recorded sound to stretch.

The player piano comparison holds here too. You could swap in a better piano and feed it the same paper roll. The performance is unchanged; the instrument is new.

Where it came from

MIDI arrived in the early 1980s to solve a practical problem. Synthesizers from different manufacturers couldn’t talk to each other, so a musician with keyboards from two companies was stuck. The industry agreed on one shared language, and it has barely changed since. That’s remarkable in technology, where most things are obsolete in five years.

Where you’ll find it

Mostly out of sight. MIDI sits underneath modern music production, film scoring, and video game audio. A USB keyboard plugged into a laptop, drum beats tapped out on a tablet, software controlling other software: all of it is a silent messenger carrying a human gesture to a computer that knows what to do with it.

So, to sum up

MIDI is a language for describing a musical performance, not a recording of one. It says which notes, when, and how hard, and leaves the sound to whatever is listening. That’s why it’s so flexible: you can change the instrument, the timing, or a single wrong note without re-recording a thing.

It’s the paper roll, not the piano. And as the player piano showed a century ago, the roll is the part you can edit.

Who Is for the Children?

Mark Twain gave the first Gilded Age its name, and I suspect he would not be surprised that we are due for a second. Gilt is cheap. It looks like gold from across the room.  Chicago is holding an election for its school board on November 3rd. Twenty-one seats. Here is what I found: everyone is for the children.

The Illinois Network of Charter Schools has about five million dollars in its super PAC and has said it will spend up to four million of it. One check was for $1.75 million, from a man who also chairs a charter school operator. The group says its first priority is a board that is independent of the teachers union and the mayor.

Another group, the Common Ground Collective, has spent about two million dollars on ads. Nearly all its recent money came from one billionaire, Michael Sacks, who calls himself a lifelong Democrat and thinks the union has too much say. A third group, Urban Center, wants to prevent what it calls a power grab.

The Chicago Teachers Union says it is not in an arms race with billionaires. That is true so far, in the way a man is not in a race until he hears the starting gun. In 2024 the union did its heaviest spending in the last weeks before the vote, and it won most of what it wanted. Its allies have already put about $305,000 into mailers for one candidate for board president, who is the union's own former deputy political director.

The union that cleans and staffs the schools, SEIU, has started a super PAC of its own. It is backing some candidates against the teachers' picks, and says the board's budget will force midyear cuts that fall on its members. So even the unions are not in one pew.

Every one of these groups can tell you, sincerely, that it speaks for the children. I believe most of them mean it. I also notice that each of them would be paid, protected, or empowered by the result. A charter operator wants contracts renewed. A union wants a majority. A rich man wants a say. Sincerity and self-interest travel together fine. They have shared a wagon for a long time.

So here is a rule from the old Gilded Age that still works. When a campaign says it is for the children, do not argue with the sentiment. Look at the checks.

Then ask each candidate three plain questions. 

1. What will you do about reading and math? 
2. What will you do about the budget? 
3. Who paid for your mailers? 

In my opinion, a candidate who answers the first two with numbers and the third with a name has earned a look.  Early voting is underway. The disclosures are public at the Illinois State Board of Elections. Chalkbeat Chicago has a voter guide. The children cannot vote. You can.

Music will be safe for now

 This is not going to be a traditional book report. In that sense I will go over the book a little bit, and maybe why you should read it, but instead, and surprisingly, this book reaffirmed my belief that in the long run, human made music will still be around for thousands of years, and we will always have musicians who excel at their craft, along with amazing songwriters, performers, producers, and engineers.

This is assuming of course:

• That AI does not kill us in the next decade or so.

• The we further reduce music as only a commodity, and push it away from being art, and just something to be consumed.

That last one is a bit much, and I will dig in more, but first to the overwhelming sense of relief I have after reading this book: Guerrilla Film Scoring: Practical Advice from Hollywood Composers.

For the straight ahead book report, this was a much better introductory book into film scoring than any other I have read so far. It really touches on each area of the process at least a little bit, and puts it in the perspective of a small independent composer and producer. There are not technical discussions of each job, and I would hesitate to really call this a reference book. This is the book that will explain a lot of the language you see in many other places. This is the book that will start to help you put the puzzle together.

Another aspect of this book that was perfect, was the sense of perspective. Guerrilla Film Scoring really is about low budget composing and low budget films. It really makes sure you realize, you the reader, that you probably are not going to start on huge budget films right out of the gate, and that you should have a basic grasp of a lot of things. You need this basic grasp, because you will most likely be doing this and many other jobs at one point in the future, if you embark on this career.

Again, this is a book that has a lot of comments and suggestions from living working composers and game sound designers sprinkled through out this book. This one tends to dole them out in little snippets depending on the subject they are discussing in that particular chapter. I perfectly recommend this book as the one parents buy their kid who might be interested. This is a great start for anyone.

Now, how this book restored my belief in music. In particular it was during the ‘studio recording’ chapter of this book, and it was meant to show and illustrate the differences that you would/ will encounter in the studio. The differences in instruments, the differences in humans, in spaces, etc. It is this exact set of statements that did it for me. It is the thing that a machine can never truly reproduce.

Early synthesizers built sound from raw oscillators, producing tones that sounded flat, sterile, and undeniably synthetic. The very early one’s were monophonic (meaning 1 note at a time), harsh, and sounding very far from the resonance of a real instrument. Decades of refinement in analog circuitry, FM synthesis, wavetable, and physical-modeling slowly and gradually softened the edges on these sounds, but it was the arrival of sample-based synthesis that truly bridged the gap.

Sample synthesis is the capturing (recording) of live instruments and then replaying them as instruments themselves from a keyboard, computer, or other MIDI device. Hans Zimmer has been a huge proponent of this his whole career. Composers, and sound designers could finally reproduce the micro dynamics, variations, and other idiosyncrasies that no waveform from math could replicate.

Even the most realistic patch still demands far more from the producer than simply pressing or programming a note. A producer must put the sound through filters, envelopes, modulation, and other controllers, so much so that, making a synth sound as much like a live instrument takes as much dedication and practice as the act of mastering a live instrument itself. I am not making this as a slight against computer only producers. Truly good one’s are as much a master of an instrument as a cellist, flautist, drummer, etc.

Now, back to our point. Back to this ‘saving of music’ part of this piece. It was this book that once again got me thinking of how many things are involved in the making of music, that are not the note. How a cellist vibrates a note, how and what finger they use. There are so many things each individual player does that are different from every other player of the same instrument, that it is ultimately unique. It is these tiny differences all added together, that gives an orchestra its sound and power.

When I was in music school, I took guitar lessons on the bass from a gentleman named Frank Dawson. Frank Dawson worked with many musicians and bands over the years, including: Marshall Vente’s Project 9+, Sonny Stitt, Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, and many others. To me though, he was always Mr. Dawson. Frank Dawson is the person who taught me how all of these idiosyncrasies turn into a signature sound that people know. Not directly at all though. And it took another 20+ years.

When I was in school, one of the groups I played in that Mr. Dawson taught was the Jazz Guitar Ensemble. The idea being 5 guitar players, plus a rhythm section. The guitar players would play like saxophone section in a big band using super-sax voicing. At least that is what Frank called it. I was playing bass guitar, but still reading the bottom rung of the sax section in treble clef. I was the baritone sax if you will.

Every once and awhile we would get Frank on a tangent, but those tangents were still always about music. We would get to talking about tunes, and players, and Frank had this uncanny ability to play anyone. I mean he could sound like anyone. (At least as far as we could tell at the time.) We would be playing through a set of changes, and he would just call out; “Now Sunny Rollins would play it like this”. Boom. Sonny Rollins. “Bird would have said it this way”. Boom. Charlie Parker. This could go on for hours. It wasn’t just jazz players though, he would throw in Steve Vai, Eric Johnson, I mean, you name it. “How Yngwie Malmsteen say it” was always one of my favorites. Not because I was a fan of Yngwie, but it was cool as hell to see this 70 year old guitar master just shred in ANY style.

At the time, I always thought that it was the phrasing, notes, etc. that would make it sound like that person. At the time I never thought it through that it was Sonny Rollins, but it was Sonny Rollins on guitar. Not Sonny Rollins on his native instrument. The one he played on Williamsburg Bridge bridge for a few years, before his comeback with Jim Hall.

It is the notes, and the sax sure, but also his embouchure. How he holds the sax. How he breaths through it. with it. How the notes move one type of quickness from one section to the next. And then the notes themselves. How loud did he play it? Did he blur it into the next one? Was the note hard attack at first, and filter off, or was it swelling into something? Did he play 1, 2 or 3 notes? Were they the same length? Did he take a break in between the notes? We could go on I’m sure, but hopefully the point has been made.

There are so many tiny little idiosyncratic things that a human can do and understand about an instrument, be they real or virtual, that a machine will never truly replicate. I mean, it can mathematically replicate the notes and volumes, but the touch, feel, and sensitivity will never be recreated. There is only one Yo Yo Ma. Literally in the physical sense and in the aural space as well. There will only ever be one as well. No one will ever sound like him again in this world.

This is why music will survive the AI slop-acolypse we are experiencing this decade currently. True appreciation of music will always be a human event with real human responses, to real human emotion expressed by a real human at a particular point in time. This is what makes music a human event, a human activity forever.

Stay Safe Everyone!

Portfolio :: Cyberpunk Demo

Channeling Vangelis for a Blade Runner-Inspired Soundtrack

Building my film score demo reel; one genre at a time.

This one's cyberpunk.

When I first opened this project, it was labeled "Cyberhuman." One word, and I was instantly in Blade Runner territory. That means only one thing: Vangelis. Lush analog synths, that slow cinematic wash of sound — it's a sound I've always wanted an excuse to chase.

So that's what this is: me channeling my inner Vangelis and finally putting some of the vintage synth gear I've collected over the years to real use.

Credit where it's due:

This piece is based on a template from Marika Schanz's film scoring series, a great resource if you're building your own composer portfolio.
🔗 https://www.marikaschanz.com/

🔗 https://1bluebass.com/studio

Portfolio :: Western Wasteland

A foray into a wasteland of sound and space, somewhere between Ludwig Göransson and Ennio Morricone.  Göransson has scored many of Ryan Coogler's films, Tenet and Odyssey for Christopher Nolan, and all the Mandalorian we've seen on TV and the big screen. Morricone needs less introduction — most Americans know him from the spaghetti westerns, especially The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

I've loved the music in The Mandalorian, that western-ish openness.  You can almost hear the air of the desert in it, and that's exactly what I tried to capture here.  The strummed dulcimer's jangly sound pulls straight from Morricone and the westerns he scored in the '50s and '60s.

This piece is gentler and less jarring than those old scores, there's no drama or conflict yet to jar you with. Just the air.

Instrumentation: Clarinet, Recorder, PVC Digeridoo, Strummed Dulcimer, Piano & Melodica

(Working title was "Dulcimer Jam" — I'm terrible at naming things on the spot when I'm not yet invested in a piece. But you have to name it to save it.)

The visuals are AI-generated (Gemini) — barren wastelands on a foreign planet, echoing the Göransson side of this; the jangly dulcimer is all Morricone.

This track is part of my portfolio reel.

🎬 Studio: https://1bluebass.com/studio

The Wasteland

I Paid My Neighbor in a Zucchini

This post is about a zucchini, a broken microphone, and why I think the outrage cycle is the most effective inertia machine ever built.

Today in Chicago it was Kanye and the ADL. Next week it’ll be someone else. I’m not interested in relitigating who’s right, I’m interested in what all this click-bait, rage-bait do to us. They’re built to make you pick a side, get outraged, share it, and feel like you did something. You didn’t. You just spent twenty minutes of your one life on a distraction engineered to be forgotten by Friday.

These cultural distractions are all just “Us and Them“ as Pink Floyd put it. That’s the whole business model. Not truth. Not resolution. Just enough friction to keep you scrolling, because scrolling is where the money is. None of that moved a single real thing in my life. What did move something was a zucchini.

This year I have had the uncanny ability for growing zucchini. A foot-long zucchini is a small zucchini for me this year. Also this summer, while I was building out my studio, one of the shock mounts for my favorite microphone broke. The piece that broke was maybe fifty cents of hardware, but you would not find it on a shelf, because it is custom to the mount. Without it, my favorite microphone was just a cool looking paperweight. Queue taps on the bugle, please. My wife, who has never met a stranger, found out our neighbor Joe was a welder. I walked over on a Tuesday. He wiped down his bench, made the part by hand, and handed my shock mount back to me like it was nothing.

I paid him in a zucchini.

Not because I couldn’t afford real payment, instead because it was what the moment called for, and he took it like it was exactly the right currency. No Questions. No invoice. No system. No middleman taking a cut. Just two guys who wave at each other now. That’s the whole counter-argument to the outrage machine, right there. It didn’t ask me to pick a side. It just needed a neighbor and a Tuesday afternoon.

These distractions allow us to create the inertia that keeps us on the couch.

If someone in your life has ever fixed something of yours and refused to take real payment for it, send them this and tell them you still owe them a zucchini.

Why I’m Scoring a Lego Movie at 50

 I continue to experience all sorts of technological hurdles with Ableton and Time code/synch. At the same time, my understanding of Native Instruments Kontakt has been growing at exponential rates. This has been good so far, but it very much feels like I am doing IT work again. This sort is the help desk kind where you struggle to find the root of the problem, while somehow it works one day, but not the other. This is my setup right now. Held together with a lot of duct tape and coat hangers.

While many technological errors are totally unforeseen, and you certainly can’t plan for things, this very much made me insular for a time again, and it was hard to open Ableton each day, just to keep my own personal commitment. I kept at it though, much like I used to with the 9 to 5. but I certainly did not feel progress. This continued me to me being more insular, and the downward spiral begins.

This got me thinking, what was stopping me. Or better said, what was preventing me from attacking each morning with enthusiasm that I was doing something I loved. After a period of time, one word sprang to mind.

Inertia

To quote Google :

“Inertia is the natural tendency of objects in motion to stay in motion and objects at rest to stay at rest, unless a force causes its velocity to change. It is one of the fundamental principles in classical physics, and is described by Isaac Newton in his first law of motion.”

For me, I am talking about the 2nd one.

Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest, unless a force is acted upon them.

When I was a kid, like many of us, I was told I could be anything I wanted to be. For me since about the middle of high school had always been music. Music was it. It made sense. The fact that it makes sense to me is still mind boggling, but that is another post for another day.

I practiced dutifully everyday. Survived high school while learning theory & history, along with a few other instruments including bass guitar. I did not actually buy a bass until my second year at Indiana. I did not meet Penelope — the bass I still play today, over 20 years later — until my mid-twenties. It was also during high school that my first introduction to multi-track recording, MIDI, and synthesis as well. The original ‘duct tape’ studio was:

1. An Apple IIe with their Basic 8 channel MIDI program

2. A Yamaha DX 7

3. An older Roland DDD-1 Drum Machine

4. A Fostex 4 track tape machine

This culminated in a medley of “Phantom of the Opera” with a few Music Honors Students, the full student choir, multiple music directors, and 1 or 2 live instrumentalists, but memory is foggy on that part honestly. Dean Nagy was kind to say, it reminded him of seeing it originally on Broadway. In truth it was probably not close at all, but as usual with my work it was earnest.

Even when I managed to get into Indiana, which is a pretty decent music school, my family was always very much “safe degree”, so you can get a “safe job”. It was mentioned often, certainly not directly, but in passing ways, such as;; “How will you pay your bills playing music?”, “You know you will never be a rock star”,, “Music is hard, are you sure you want to do that?” [edit: Sorry, this is not meant to be a ‘my family sucks post’]. This lead to me changing majors to English, so much for safe, but they thought I would be a teacher, so they shut up.

It is not just our families though. We here it day in and day out in comments when we share with others. The snide jokes. the off hand comments. This works its way into you after some time. It creates a virtual weight as well. This weight keeps us in this state of rest. It prevents us from taking up martial arts, from learning to paint, trying new foods, to sometimes even just putting down the game controller.

We give it a voice in our head; “I can’t do ……” or “I can’t be ……”. We make excuses as well; “It’s hard”, “People will laugh”,, “There are already so many others doing this.”, worse, we say out loud “I can’t” This gets worse when you are a parent, because while you are telling your kids to be what they want, you are announcing to the world, that this s something you won’t/ can’t/ etc do. Kids listen to the things you expect the least sometimes.

This is the all a part of the Inertia I am trying to share. The self imposed quicksand of doubt that we throw ourselves into. This has been the inertia that I struggle to overcome with everyday. This was the Inertia, that I may have finally recognized, and finally gotten angry enough at it, that I have applied force.

I have been working on my film score demo reel, and learning as much as I can as fast as I can about the Industry. There is still a mountain of books, and 3 courses waiting for me to complete as well, but for me life experience has always been the toughest teacher, so….

the movie industry, films, theater, and all of it take a long time to produce and make and everything, so to channel my creative energy in a forward direction, I am creating my own film to score with my youngest daughter. It will involve a lot of legos, and the quality of the movie I am sure will be a solid C at best, but it should be an honest 20 or so minutes (I hope) of film, that needs a real score, and allows me to develop themes and honest melodies.

While it has only been 4 to 5 honest days of work on the film at this point, I am wildly at work, and Inertia seems to be held at bay.

For some reason I know that I will find my path as long as I keep going with “Penelope”. Things have always made more sense with her, than without. When I make sure to work with her first thing in the morning, the remainder of the day could be shit, but I still feel a sense of accomplishment. Even on those days I described at the beginning of the post with non stop technological hurdles.

I want all of us to find their “Penelope”.

P.S. The name wasn't a deliberate reference to The Odyssey, but there still seems to be a psychic connection between me, the bass, and the tale of Odysseus.

The Week I Switched DAWs

 I had a few short pieces finished. I was into a  fourth: "Haunted House", and the music was already set in my head.  The hard part was never going to be the writing or figuring out the melodies, chords, whatever.  The hard part was getting a video file into Ableton without it choking.

I spent days on that problem.  Down-coding video in Shortcut just to get more than five audio tracks running.  Nothing against a minimalist score, but that's not always what is needed for the project.  I need to be more flexible, I think.

Somewhere in that search I found the idea of syncing two machines the way you'd sync two MIDI instruments.  Made sense.  I set it up, felt good about it, then tried to merge the two pieces together.

Nothing lined up.

I checked frame rates. Reloaded Ableton four or five times.  Watched it play correctly on the two-PC setup, exported, and watched it fall apart again.  So I loaded the video straight into Ableton instead; didn't even risk playing it first, just exported cold.  Waited.  Played it back.  Still off, but off in a new way this time.  Warp was disabled on the file.  Fixed that, and the timing got closer, but closer isn't done, nor is it correct.

Turned out the real problem was that Ableton can't send MTC.  My options were a Max for Live device that doesn't run on my version of Ableton, or a hardware box.  Neither one felt like a solution. Both felt like a tax.  Also, neither sounded like something I could get the project done by Friday.  That's the moment I started looking at Reaper.

Four days later I'm mid-switch, and of course Ableton picks that week to work again. Fixed my MIDI-OX settings, hit play, and it synced clean.  I went to lunch feeling like a genius.  Came back and none of it worked.  Turns out Windows MIDI drivers only let one program own a port at a time, and Ableton had quietly grabbed it while I wasn't looking.  The fix is to close everything, reopen it in the right order, every time. That's not a workflow. That's a ritual. Also Friday is getting closer.

So, back to Reaper.  Reaper opens faster, which by itself has already saved me hours.  But I'm fighting my own hands.  Fifteen years of Ableton shortcuts are wired into my fingers, and every session I break something because I'm using the wrong software's muscle memory.

Then Thursday I tried to load Kontakt 7 into a new Reaper track and Reaper crashed.  Tried again.  Same crash.  Reinstalled Kontakt.  Reinstalled Reaper.  Rebooted between each attempt.  Nothing changed.  Kontakt runs fine standalone.  Reaper runs fine without it.  Every other NI plugin loads. Just not this one, just not together.  I don't have an answer for that yet.  Again Friday.

With a 2pm deadline and a piece that needed Kontakt to exist, I time-stretched the video in Shotcut instead. Didn't work.  Turns out the file was variable frame rate, and Shotcut doesn't handle that well either.  What did work was printing the mix in real time: new audio track in Ableton, resampling input, arm and record while Reaper drove the transport over rtpMIDI.  Old-school, one pass, no offline bounce to miscalculate. That's how "Haunted House" got made.

---

I spent twenty years in information security. My job was finding the failure point before it found you. I did not expect that skill to be the main thing I use every day now, just aimed at a DAW instead of a network. But that's what this career change actually is, most weeks. Not inspiration. Troubleshooting.

Nobody tells you that part when you decide to leave a stable job at fifty to go make music for independent film. They tell you about the joy of the work, which is real, and they leave out the part where you lose an entire afternoon to a MIDI port lock. Both are true. I still had a deliverable Friday. I still made it.

If you're switching careers, switching tools, switching anything after twenty years of doing it one way — expect the tools to fight you longer than you think they should. Budget the time for that fight into your week, not just the time for the work you actually want to be doing. It'll take it either way. Better to plan for it than be surprised by it.

"Haunted House" is up. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/9Ho2EUMAjyo. Audio's also on SoundCloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/cV8hkC2GL2pNHqQNJu

Next week I get to find out what breaks next.

Starting Over at 50

 I was laid off recently by my Fortune 500 employer, and it knocked the grounding out from underneath me. I’d actually seen it coming. I had told a few friends around last Christmas that it might happen soon. But when it did, I was still dumbstruck. I was fortunate to get a severance package, and I have some savings in cash and stocks, but I still have a mortgage on a house in Chicago.

So here’s what I’m doing about it: after 20 years in IT, a mortgage, a wife, and two kids, I’m becoming a composer.

I know how that sounds. I’ve heard it my whole life:
- safe degrees
- safe jobs
- doing the smart thing.

So let me be clear about what this isn’t.

This is not another “I was a corporate C-suite exec, or I founded such-and-such, and had a sudden epiphany I need to share with the world” story. I was never a partner, director, or VP. At best, I managed 12 people spread across the globe for a couple of years, leading an Incident Response team for a Fortune 500 company. I’m not an internet founder who cashed out and gets to wander the world.

I’m a 50-plus former IT worker about to go in a completely different direction and I have no illusions of grandeur. I’m not hoping to be the next pop sensation. Honestly, I never aspired to that kind of life anyway.

How I got here

I’m not sure exactly when it started, but at some point I began to feel like the cubicle, even a nice one, was just a slow death. We had an open floor plan, and I’d worked from home since COVID, so it wasn’t the physical space. It was that being “the cog” in a large Fortune 500 machine had stopped giving me work I actually wanted to do. Most days, I spent more time tracking down the owner of some system, application, or process than I did doing any real work at all. Wash, rinse, repeat.

To be fair, this company rivaled a lot of startups in the quality of life it offered. And the steadiness was genuinely great when I first started; paying bills on time, finally getting a car, all of it. But the emptiness in the actual work kept growing, day by day, paycheck by paycheck, bonus cycle by bonus cycle. As time went on, I fit less and less into that life.

Going back to my roots

Growing up, I wanted to be John Williams. Then it was Danny Elfman and Thomas Newman. For most of my IT career, I quietly longed to write music like Heitor Pereira or Hans Zimmer. Lately it’s been Ludwig Göransson and the bass recorder. Along the way I’ve come to love plenty of others too: Howard Shore, Alan Silvestri, Vangelis, James Newton Howard, Tom Holkenborg, Steve Jablonsky, Trevor Rabin.

I’ve also grown to love and understand the classics; Max Steiner, Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone. Honestly, I didn’t have a pretty girl on my wall growing up. I had a poster of the orchestra. Truthfully, yes, there was plenty of Star Wars stuff up there too.

That’s the direction I’m heading now: composing, and working as hard as I can in film, theater, dance, and any other form of mixed media that will have me.

If you’d like to know more about my background, you can find my resume and bio here: https://1bluebass.com/studio

I have no idea what the future holds. Maybe success. Maybe homelessness. Stay tuned to find out.

In the meantime, here’s a look at my composing desk, where all of this actually starts, and a video in what will become my portfolio. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you’ll come back for the next installment.

Until then — safe travels

The Gilded Pew: A View from the Street

Channeling the Spirit of Studs Terkel

The tape is rolling. It's 2026, and the air in Chicago is thick with the same old promises, just wrapped in newer, shinier digital foil.  We're talking about faith today folks.  Not the kind that moves mountains, but the kind that moves poll numbers. 

I'm sitting here thinking about the people I met over the years.  Some were bricklayers with hands like weathered leather.  I'd hear it often: "Studs, a building is only as good as its foundation.  If the bottom is rotten, the gold leaf at the top of the dome doesn't mean a lick." I watched the critters in Washington on Sunday.

Take Senator Tim Sheehy.  He's up there in our hallowed halls, clutching his chest because the nation's capital can't host a gala without a "threat of violence."  He calls it an "embarrassment" that we don't have a proper ballroom for the Dear Leader.  Now, you can walk down just about any street in this city and you'll see an embarrassment, if you listen and look.  You'll see a man who served in the Marines, sitting on a milk crate with his life in a plastic bag.  You might see someone's mother choosing between the light bill and the prayer she's whispering over her sick child.  But for our great Senator, the tragedy isn't the broken body of a veteran or the hunger of a neighbor, it's the lack of a chandelier-lit room where the powerful can clink glasses in peace.  

Then there's John Fetterman, the man who traded the picket line for the party line, or maybe just a different set of hoodies. Nobody's quite sure which party he's attending, but he is talking about "TDS", Trump Derangement Syndrome, for the few who haven't yet heard that particular piece of name-calling, as if questioning the morality of a movement is itself a kind of vanity. This great senator wants us to "drop the TDS" and just build that White House ballroom.

It's a new brand of name-calling, folks.  A digital stamp for "shut up and follow."  It's the same "snowflake" talk from the "but her emails" days, just polished up for the next election cycle.

The irony is as thick as the smog over the Dan Ryan.  These folks proclaim a "Christian" identity as if it's a membership at Mar-a-Lago.  They use the mythology of the Carpenter from Nazareth, to justify a culture of greed and exclusion.  They've turned "Love thy neighbor" into "Check thy neighbor's voter registration."  They've swapped the Beatitudes for a spreadsheet of corporate tax cuts.

It's a cultural identity, a jacket they put on to signal they're part of the "right" tribe, while the actual teachings, the ones about mercy and the "least of these," get left out in the cold like an unwanted guest.

The worker in the cubicle and the guy on the assembly line, they know when they're being sold a bill of goods.  Christianity, in its essence, is supposed to be a radical empathy.  What we're seeing now is a radical selfishness, dressed in Sunday best and demanding a ballroom while the world outside is shivering.

The Weaponization of Christianity

 How Charlie Kirk used Christianity to divide America

    In the landscape of American political discourse, few figures embody the marriage of Christian identity and partisan warfare quite like Charlie Kirk.  The founder of Turning Point USA has become a fixture in Republican circles, his influence extending from college campuses to the highest levels of GOP strategy, including close ties to Trump’s campaign operations.  But Kirk’s brand of Christianity, one that frames politics as existential combat and opponents as enemies of God and country, reveals something deeper and more troubling: the transformation of a once-radical faith into a weapon of control, division, and the preservation of power.

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The Golden Calf in the Radio Box

 I was once told by a man of the cloth, one of the old-fashioned kind who still believed the Red Letters were more than just a stylistic choice by the printer, that the quickest way to lose your soul is to find a way to sell it at a profit. Now, I’ve seen many a curious thing in my travels, but nothing quite so peculiar as the modern American spectacle where a man can be convinced that the path to the Pearly Gates is paved with high-interest newsletters and a healthy dose of loathing for his neighbor.

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The New Gospel of the Gilded Calf

 It has been remarked by men wiser than myself that the Good Book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out. These days, however, it seems a whole congregation of folks have looked into the Gospel and somehow mistaken the Beatitudes for a business prospectus.

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highway drive 2X Speed - #lakeshoredrive #chicago #timelapse

doesn't really help

https://lexisantamaria.substack.com/p/sorry-nebraska-farmers-america-is

This was a tough article for me, because I very much understand how the author feels.  I'm gonna vote for the leopards. Are gonna eat my face party. But then complain when leopards are actually eating my face.  I totally get it on the others part, but.....

How is this just not further divisive talk?  Great, You were right, You voted for the right person, Good for you.  The farmers didn't.  You chastising and castigating the farmers doesn't fix the situation, it only makes you feel better about being right.  

Now the real reality is gonna set in this fall. When there's no crops to feed the country.  

I hope you feel really good about being right then.

I doubt it

https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/opinion/report/032825_fema_states_op/if-fema-didnt-exist-could-states-handle-disaster-response-their-own/

voter rights

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows blasts Trump elections order

https://www.pressherald.com/2025/03/28/maine-secretary-of-state-shenna-bellows-blasts-trump-elections-order/

Utah bans flags

https://www.ksl.com/article/51284267/utah-is-first-state-to-ban-fluoride-in-water-restrict-flags-on-public-buildings

Interesting what the governor called out; 

"Finally, as tired as Utahns are of politically divisive symbols, I think they are also tired of culture war bills that don't solve the problems they intend to fix"

the different dump administrations

somehow this is sleep Joe's fault

I can't wait to see the mental gymnastics performed by the White House to explain how and why this is joe biden's fault.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/feds-preferred-inflation-gauge-shows-prices-increased-more-than-expected-in-february-123310140.html