I will be performing a full one-hour set with Skyline Festival on February 28, to celebrate the three-year anniversary of Wolfie’s Hangout. It is also being streamed to Twitch.

Briefly, here’s what’s going on:

• We are finally working on recording Misfits, our next album. The overall theme is “children’s music, but for grownups.”
• We’re also working on some game music, as we’ve been approached by three separate teams working on games for Strawberry Jam 10 (hey, that’s another one for the success list)
• And of course we’re doing some VRChat performances
• fluffy’s also been busy editing some past live performance videos
• Also as a reminder, we are totally an actual band with so many people in it and not just fluffy pretending to be a bunch of people through clever production tricks and writing in the third person plural for some reason

Anyway. No idea when Misfits will be done (Strawberry Jam 10 has the time-based priority, of course), but it’s been a long time coming. If you want to track its progress, feel free to follow the Patreon or whatever.

I performed a short set of songs at Trans Academy’s' Moonlit gathering! Join group TRANS.7885 to join future events like these, or watch on twitch.

I performed at VRelium Arcadia, their special show celebrating the second anniversary of VRelium’s formation! Join group RELIUM.8220 for access to future shows.

As is typical, this show was a benefit fundraiser; this time the charity was Shatterproof, an organization that’s working to stop the addiction fatality epidemic through evidence-based efforts. Please consider making a donation!

I performed at a show celebrating the growth of Phoenix Haven, a VRChat group about giving people second chances. Join VRChat group PHOHEA.2927 for access to thr group!

So here’s how my performing setup works!

The hardware side

Previously I was using an amalgam of the built-in mic on my headset, the line input on my onboard audio, and VoiceMeeter to tie everything together. Unfortunately, this setup had some pretty severe limitations, especially when it came to managing latency (particularly with backing tracks), as well as being able to add live effects to the signal chain. It also led to some embarrassing situations where my audio would go haywire due to a connector coming loose or the like.

A few years ago, I upgraded my recording studio from a Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 to an 18i20, so I had this spare 18i8 just sitting around. I was using it on my office computer (where I do my video editing and programming), but it was massive overkill for those needs, and I came to realize it works much better for my performance setup instead. So now I have a plain old headphone amp in the office, and the 18i8 is on my VR computer.

The 18i8 has a handy feature where you can set up multiple output/monitor submixes, so for example you can have different audio levels of different things going to the headphones, the line outputs, and so on. It also has a built-in “loopback” interface, where you can give it a monitor mix that then appears as a standard audio input to the computer. These features are extremely useful for this use case (as well as any other live performance or studio recording situation).

I have the following connections:

• Front input 1: My microphone (I currently switch between an MXL condenser mic and an Electro-Voice dynamic depending on my mood and what’s sounding better at the moment)
• Front input 2: My guitar signal chain
• Headphone output 1: a LEKATO Wireless IEM system (which in turn connects to some old 3.5mm Apple earbuds, which give me a nice balance of size and audio quality; there are better ones to buy new but I had these lying around from some old iPhone or something)¹
• Headphone output 2: my tiny lunchbox amp
• My reverb unit, with its inputs on the 18i8’s Line 1-2 outputs, and its outputs on the 18i8’s Line 5-6 inputs
• Front input 3 and 4: Available for other instruments (sometimes I plug my digital piano in there, for example)

I have the reverb unit set to 100% wet, so that it is only being used as a bus send. I also have a bypass toggle pedal so that I can cut to a purely dry signal when needed (such as in A Long Plastic Hallway, which uses lack-of-reverb as an effect for emphasis).

Mix setup

First, I use the multiple input functionality to provide Windows audio devices for all of the necessary channels.

Windows 10 and 11 also have a feature where you can assign arbitrary labels to your audio inputs and outputs; I use this to give the following names to the playback channels:

• Playback 1+2: Playback
• Playback 3+4: Game audio
• Playback 5+6: Control room

and I also set labels on my VR headset’s microphone and speakers, just to make them easier to keep track of.

In Focusrite Control I have separate submixes for all three of the outputs, as well as the loopback interface.

Headphone 1 gets the monitor mix that goes to my IEMs. It receives all of the input channels, as well as all three² “Playback” channels (which are used to route multiple separate software outputs into separate mixes).

Headphone 2 gets the same, minus the microphone (to avoid feedback), and is connected to the line input on my lunchbox amp.³

Line 1-2 (reverb send) gets just the instruments; I bake the reverb into my backing tracks.

Loopback gets the mix that goes out to the stream and/or world.

Software setup

Unlike before, I do not need Voicemeeter, and I do not even have it installed anymore, as all of the audio that goes to the stream is now handled by the 18i8, and I do not need to mix anything into or from my VR headset.

I have configured VLC (which I use for playing my backing tracks) to output to the Playback 1+2 device by default.

OBS setup

OBS allows you to set up multi-channel audio recording. I set OBS to use channel 1 in the stream, and to record all 6 channels to separate tracks in my local recording. Then I have the following audio input sources:

As well as the following audio output captures:

Finally, I have a bunch of visuals set up; mostly this is Spout2 to capture my in-game streaming camera, and Waveform to let me do various audio visualizers in varying combinations.

Mic boosted performances

When doing a mic boosted performance, I set my system audio output to Playback 3+4 (Game Audio) and VRChat’s audio input to Loopback. This way, my full final audio mix goes to my VRChat microphone, and I hear the game in my IEMs. My backing track works the same as anywhere else.

The one downside to this setup is that my lip sync will also follow my instruments and backing track, but there’s not a lot I can do about that aside from adding face tracking to my VR setup.

If I want to record my performance, I launch OBS and set it to record. OBS is not involved in the signal chain going to the world at all.

Streamed performances

Most streamed performances involve a Discord voice call for coordinating between the show runners and the performers. This is where the “control room” channel comes in; I set Discord’s voice to use my VR headset’s microphone as input, and Playback 5+6 as speakers. This way the voice chat only hears my voice (rather than all of my instruments), and I can hear anything they say on my IEMs. The Discord call gets recorded to track 5, with the left channel being me and the right channel being everyone else.

Otherwise, my audio setup is as follows:

• System audio to Playback 3+4
• VRChat microphone is the VR headset mic (so it gets clean lipsync)
• And I set VRChat’s “microphone output level” to 0%, so that my camera can see my lips move but the audio doesn’t go out into the world⁴

As far as running the stream itself goes, typically I stream either to my Owncloud instance or to VRCDN depending on the needs of the show. Larger shows provide their own streaming ingest.

• Owncloud lets me serve an absolute crapton of viewers (thanks in part to my overly-complicated CDN setup), but it’s not allowed as a stream source by default in VRChat so people need to enable untrusted URLs. It also tends to be pretty high in latency, usually on the order of 6-10 seconds.
• VRCDN limits me to 40 concurrent viewers, but the latency is pretty low (usually 1-2 seconds). This is fine for smaller shows, and many showrunners will restream my VRCDN stream into the world with their own visuals overlaid on top anyway, which also adds some latency.
• Larger music festivals (such as VRelium) will provide their own ingest server and stream management.

Editing recordings

And now the really nice thing about this setup is that I can do some audio editing and remixing in retrospect. I do most of my video editing in DaVinci Resolve, which has pretty good multichannel audio support.

By default, the video will be pulled in with the following stereo audio tracks:

Typically what I’ll do is separate out the audio tracks from the video, and I’ll shift track 6 back to compensate for the latency between me and the audience. For mic-boost performances this isn’t much (usually under a second) and can usually be ignored, but for streamed performances this will be multiple seconds (often on the order of 20 or more!) and this is especially important during those magical times when people either respond to my banter or sing along with me! (The latter happens with the call-and-response bits in Safety In Numbers, and it fills me with warm fuzzies every time.)

If the track 1 (live mix) audio is fine, I’ll use it and track 6 directly, and mute the other tracks. However, sometimes I need to get fancy and change the mix in retrospect. In that case, I’ll change my audio tracks as such:

• Audio 1: Stereo, using channels 1+2 (live mix)
• Audio 2: Mono, using channel 3 (voice)
• Audio 3: Mono, using channel 4 (guitar)
• Audio 4: Stereo, using channels 5+6 (reverb, and piano if I happened to use it)
• Audio 5: Stereo, using channels 7+8 (backing track)
• Audio 6: Stereo, using channels 12+11 (game audio, swapped to present it from the audience’s POV)⁵

In this situation, I’ll mute tracks 2-4, and use track 1 to line up tracks 5 and 6, which will have differing amounts of latency. Then I’ll mute track 1 and unmute 2-4, and then adjust my recorded mix as necessary.

Track 6 in particular needs to be lined up pretty carefully, as OBS captures outputs with no latency at all, but inputs get about 300ms of latency due to limitations in Windows audio. In theory I could have OBS add 300ms or so of latency to the output capture, but it’s fiddly and I’d still need to adjust things anyway, so I’d might as well just do it once when I edit.⁶

Backing track/playlist setup

When I’m performing there’s a lot of stuff to keep track of. If I’m only doing 1-2 songs I can load the .wav files into VLC and it’s no big deal, but many of my shows are much more complicated and my ADHD brain can only hold so much stuff in my working memory.

So, I have a Final Cut Pro library that contains all of my backing tracks; some songs have multiple versions available (e.g. with and without guitar mixed in, or album vs. live versions). In the library files I also have brief version notes and the dominant key signature, and with this I can quickly put together a set list with a reasonable progression and fitting the time constraints.

A few of the songs also have a lyric display baked in, because try as I might, I just can’t memorize every song⁷. For some songs I’ll use Croonify to prepare a synchronized lyric display (replacing Croonify’s stem-separated audio with my own clean backing track), but for others I’ll just put up some basic text with the necessary cues to keep me from messing up too badly.

When I prepare my set, I’ll also put in a bit of visual stuff for my own reference, such as having it display the title of the next song or little notes like “2 songs left” or specific banter points I need to hit.

When I encode the video I’ll just use Final Cut’s “Export File (default)” to do a quick lossless encode and then I’ll use FFmpeg to encode the final video at a more useful bitrate, with:

ffmpeg -i "2026-02-30 example.mov" -b:a 320k \
    "~/Sync/backing tracks/shows/2026-02-30 example.mp4"

Finally, I use SyncThing to automatically synchronize my ~/Sync directory between my various computers, which is super handy. (It’s also a lot easier than dealing with network shares!)

When it’s time to perform, I’ll use SteamVR’s desktop overlay function to float my VLC window in the world with me, and so then I’ll always have my visual reference where I need it. (So if you see me looking downward a lot, it isn’t just me being introverted.)

When it comes to actually performing, I make sure that VLC has keyboard focus and then I can just press the space bar on my keyboard to start and, if necessary, pause the backing track.

Doing sound checks

Sound checks used to be rather difficult; previously, I’d do a laborious process of recording the loopback interface into Audacity while performing parts of my set, listen back afterwards, and then try making incremental adjustments. This process was super annoying.

Nowadays I’ve found a much better way; basically:

First, I open two instances of VLC:

• The first instance gets my backing track (and continues to play to Playback 1+2)
• The second instance is set to play to Playback 5+6, upon which I “open capture device,” set to the loopback audio with a 10-second caching delay.

Then, I can unpause my backing track player and perform for 10 seconds, then pause the backing track while I listen to how it sounded. This gives me a much faster means of iterating on my adjustments and getting things sounding really good.

1. Props to Niko Fox for turning me on to this specific wireless IEM unit. ↩

2. I actually have all four going to it but Playback 7+8 isn’t used for anything. Someday I might figure out a way of using it for a click track or additional audio cues, though. ↩

3. I don’t usually have the amplifier’s speakers on when I’m performing but it’s nice to have when I’m practicing. Additionally, the amplifier’s line output and instrument input are no longer connected to anything, as they are not needed in this setup. I do still use the amplifier’s power bus for my pedal board, however. ↩

4. Note that other people in the instance won’t see the lips move, though, although for me it’s most important that my local camera does. If you need the lip movement to be visible to someone else (for example, someone else recording/streaming you directly), set your microphone output level to 5%, which will broadcast your visemes to others while keeping the audio level as low as possible. ↩

5. Or I could try to remember to set my VRChat camera to “audio from camera” mode and pass the stereo through normally, but I usually forget to do this. It also makes communicating with others on stage much more difficult since consciously overriding the incorrect positional audio cues is super hard to brain. ↩

6. In theory one could use ASIO to mitigate the latency (via the respective OBS plugin), but there’s still going to be some latency, and I err on the side of pragmatism since I’m going to have to adjust things anyway. Also, even if the latency can be eliminated from OBS’s point of view, it’s still going to be present for VRChat, so it’s going to need to be adjusted between the visuals and the audio, and that is, in my experience, much harder to do well. ↩

   There’s also the issue of ASIO often requiring exclusive access to the device, which means it might not even work in this situation to begin with.

   So basically, ASIO might work but I haven’t tried it nor have I seen any compelling reason to.

7. Although I’m proud to say that most of the songs I perform I do have completely memorized, and the more I perform songs I’m not off-book on yet, the closer I get to getting there. Assistive technology FTW. ↩

I’m pleased as punch to have performed at VRelium’s 2025 holiday show, benefitting The Trevor Project. I did not come up with any holiday-appropriate music to sing.

Success updates

First, here’s the criteria I laid out as what I’d see as feeling “successful.”

• The amount of income I get from my music would be sufficient as a living wage

  This is still incredibly far away, and I’m not sure it will ever be achievable with the way the music industry is, especially for independent musicians. It’s also kind of a low priority for me, though, as my other sources of income are sufficient for now.

• Any time I release something new, I have a fanbase that acquires it without prompting

  This isn’t something I’ve really had a good measure of, but I will say that this still hasn’t been the case for my two releases this year

• Any release pays for its own production costs within its first month of release

  I’d say I still haven’t hit this benchmark just yet. Neither of my releases this year cost in terms of software or equipment (in that I didn’t have to buy anything new for them), but like, I’m still super far in the hole in terms of my startup costs, and even distributing The War Machine to streaming cost $5 which I haven’t yet recouped.

  strawberry jelly :9 has made around $94 this year, though, and I also got a job out of it, so, that’s worth something.

• I have enough fans that YouTube actively tries to retain my content rather than treating my channel as a liability

  This still hasn’t quite changed, although I’m starting to feel it turn a corner, especially with my move to self-administering my videos. (On that note, gosh, I’m falling behind on that project…)

• Any release I put out gets visibility in the various streaming platforms' algorithms

  Nope, but also I’ve decided to just not care about streaming for now, which feels like a much healthier solution to the problem.

• People approach me to express interest in hiring me

  This is something that’s changed! In that, as mentioned, some of the work I did on strawberry jelly :9 got me hired as the composer for a small game. It isn’t much, but it’s something.

• Concert organizers approach me to express interest in me performing with them

  And this one I can happily say has definitely been satisfied; quite a few of my VRChat performances have now been things where people approached me to play at them, instead of me needing to seek out and apply for things.

• I am approached with offers for representation, either via an agent or a record label

  I am still not signed with a record label (and at this point I’m not sure I even want to be), but I do have a booking agent for my VRChat shows! And she’s the one who approached me with the idea, after having booked me for a couple of events.

• I have people trying to interpret my songs on their own, whether correctly or incorrectly, and reading their own meaning into them regardless

  This has happened a little bit. So far as I know nobody’s yet to submit their own interpretations to Genius or whatever, but people have asked questions about some of my lines, and that’s a good first step!

Also, here’s a thing I didn’t think of on the original list but which is something that I feel is very much worth celebrating:

• People start to recognize me for my music

  And this is another cool thing that’s been happening. The performances I’ve done in VRChat have led to people recognizing me as a musician in random places and folks will even compliment me on my music. More than one person has even had a favorite song of mine! (It seems to be tied between Freak Flag and Material Change.)

  I also got a surge of interest and recognition after my presence at Furality. (Also a nice little spike of streaming playtime, which unfortunately didn’t last long.)

  It’s still only something that occurs in very small pockets in VRChat, and is often intertwined with the work I do for Trans Academy, but it’s been super gratifying and feels great.

The year in review

Here’s a breakdown of some of my activity:

• Released one single and one album
• Got hired on a game OST as a result of the album
• Finally got a bunch of my albums re-released on CD
• Did a bit more Novembeat than last year, and ended up writing a few new songs for an upcoming album as a result
• Performed a bunch of shows, mostly in VR but one in real life as well
• Made about $450 on Bandcamp, $30 on Mirlo, and $3 that I’ll never see on streaming platforms
• Also got a decent chunk of change from the Internet Archive show (which I really need to get around to posting, oops) — I can highly recommend the experience to anyone who’s interested in applying!
• Revamped my YouTube channel and got a lot more visibility as a result
• Completely changed the way I do my live performances, including producing a bunch of backing tracks to add to the experience

Looking forward

In 2026, as usual, I hope to get a couple of albums done. Here’s what’s on my current backlog (which is, regrettably, nearly the exact same backlog as I had for 2025):

• The next collection of random unreleased songs to be released (including a bunch of Song Fight! and some other random things I’ve had sitting around for ages)
• A self-cover album, where I want to revamp some of my older songs based on how I perform them today
• A jazz album!
• An album full of covers of more famous/popular music (this one will be tricky and expensive to get all the proper licenses for it)
• And of course, the full OST for the game I’m working on

I also want to get the rest of my back-catalog up on YouTube, which would be a lot easier if I stop thinking that I need to go overboard on the visualizers, and I also want to get some work done on a Canimus-enabled player of some sort. Which isn’t super relevant to making music, but it’s very relevant to helping musicians to be heard in general.

Finally, my plan for performing has been to do 1-2 bigger shows a month, and I’m pretty sure that’s something that I can make happen.

I performed a half-hour set with Skyline Festival on November 21! The show was for the benefit of Feeding America, a very important charity in this day and age.

Website

I’ve been slowly working on fully tagging all of my releases. At this point it’s at about 90% coverage, with nearly everything having genre tags and most things also having instrument and mood tags.

Novembeat

Some years I produce a lot of music for Novembeat. Some years, not so much. Usually it ends up with an album at the end.

So far I’ve made 10 tracks (all posted on the YouTube playlist) which is on the low end but it’s been fun to play with things all the same. I might do more this month although I haven’t been super motivated. The last few tracks I worked on I at least streamed live on YouTube which was a lot of fun.

Some of the tracks I’ve made so far are ones that I definitely want to revisit as full tracks and don’t want to do a half-assed release at the end of the month, and the other tracks are ones that are fun as tooling around but nothing I am really super inspired to release on an album, so I think this year I’m just going to limit it to the playlist (same as I did last year) and treat it as a fun exercise instead of it being A Thing. Especially since I no longer really feel the pressure to feed the streaming algorithms.

New music

I’m still working on the soundtrack for a game, and it’s coming¹ along nicely. Our goal is to release the game in 2026, although there’s nothing more firm than that which I can disclose publicly.

I’m also continuing to work on music for some other clients, and collecting more ideas/gumption for whittling down my album production backlog.

Performances

I’m excited for two performances, Skyline Aurora Fest this Friday and the Trans Furs Support System anniversary show next Saturday. I’ve upgraded my performance setup even further to make these the best shows I can. Some highlights:

• I’m now using backing tracks combined with live instruments, and many of the backing tracks are specific to my live performances with new arrangements
• I have a pretty complete pedalboard that gives me much more control over my live sound, including a proper reverb setup
• I’ve switched to using some wireless IEMs that give me a lot more freedom within my VR playspace and cuts down on the fragility of my monitoring setup

I’m also trying to get in on the beta for the EOZ immersive gloves in order to get proper hand tracking while I perform, although it’ll still be some time before that happens. Right now it’s definitely the most promising option that’s coming to market in the foreseeable future.

YouTube channel update

Switching to self-administered releases on my channel has been the best decision I’ve made, for unexpected reasons.

Normally, when releasing music to YouTube, you have to go through a distributor, i.e. the same companies that put music on services like Spotify and Apple Music. Technically, YouTube Music releases are separate from regular YouTube, and the “official artist channel” function is just a way of getting YouTube Music releases to appear on the “releases” tab of the official artist website.

The plus side to this method is that all music listened through YouTube Music gets administered like any other music stream, and YouTube pays out around half a penny per play, which isn’t nothing. And it’s also nice that these releases show up on the release tab, and have all of the necessary metadata for music business things. But it has several downsides as well:

• There’s basically no control over what appears on the video description
• There’s no control over what the video content actually is (generally it’s just a static image of the cover art)
• There’s no way to directly provide synchronized lyrics/subtitles, auto-captioned or otherwise, unless it’s a feature provided by your distributor (and setting that up at the distributor side is a pain in the butt)
• The artist has absolutely no control over how anything is organized
• YouTube Music plays do nothing to help with discovery within the greater YouTube algorithm and doesn’t affect the artist’s YouTube watch stats
• Listeners aren’t actually directed to the musician’s channel (at least, not reliably) and there’s no real integration between YouTube Music and general YouTube following
• The artist doesn’t benefit from any of YouTube’s copyright tools beyond what their distributor makes available (usually at great added expense and with exceptionally poor granularity)

And none of these are issues for self-administered videos! So far I’ve had the following benefits already:

• People have discovered my music through the regular YouTube recommendation feed
• I’ve hit a new watch time milestone which is good for the ol' dopamine factory
• I’m having a lot of fun figuring out various forms of audio visualizer on the videos
• I am able to do my own copyright administration based on my own preferences

It isn’t perfect, of course. Since I’m going through regular YouTube plays, I don’t automatically get paid for listens (not that I was making that much to begin with), although hopefully I’ll hit a monetization threshold at some point. Also, if someone does get recommended a song through the feed, they’ll just get it on its own with no link into its respective playlist (although I suppose I could at least put a link in the description). Also there’s no way for me to organize playlists into groups; I think that feature does become available to larger creators, but I haven’t hit whatever threshold is necessary for that just yet.

I could do more whole-album videos to preserve the album-oriented listening experience, and I’ll probably get around to doing that when I’m done clearing this reupload backlog.

But anyway

I am a busy bee and I still have to manage my energy and chronic pain (and being up this late to blog about it certainly isn’t helping). But things are feeling pretty okay right now.

1. heh ↩

I’ll replace the Refactor videos with the new ones on Monday because they new ones are way better and that album is pretty special to me (and I’ll just delist the old videos rather than delete them outright), but I think I’ll leave Radio Ready and Instrumental alone.

In any case here’s my current tentative YouTube album rerelease schedule:

which would actually cover my entire back-catalog, aside from Wiener Dog on a Motorcycle (which I still want to do a full music video for instead of a visualizer release) and pointed little quill which is still available on YouTube Music.

Of course this is subject to change due to any number of factors, especially if I actually manage to get one of my backburnered albums out in the interim.

My current plan is to do two releases per week; on Mondays will be what I consider my “real” or “authored” albums, and Thursdays will be what I consider “jam” albums. The categorization of these is a little wishy-washy, but for example, things I’ve done for Novembeat and Strawberry Jam are “jam” albums, while things like Refactor and Songs of Substance are “authored” albums.

Release schedule (intended)

This is my current release schedule plan:

There’s a bunch of albums not yet on that list and I’m not sure if I want them to have YouTube rereleases just yet. I’ll probably use the empty Mondays to release them, possibly in groups (for example, several of the game jam OSTs are quite short).

Some technical details

To actually make the videos I’ve finally wrapped my head around how FFmpeg filter graphs work, and I’m building up a little repertoire of visual hacks that let me make the various things look nice.

For example, here’s the Novembeat 2020 video setup files, for those who are interested. FFmpeg scripts aren’t super easy to comment, but probably the trickiest thing is the way the remap filter works; basically, the X and Y channels must be in 16-bit grayscale mode, and directly reference pixel coordinates, but it’s not super easy to set up colors like that in Affinity Studio (my graphics editor of choice) so instead I draw things as a grayscale ramp (which end up with values 0-65535 in the 16-bit mapping) and then scale it down to try to map them to 0-255. Buuuuut Affinity also ends up dithering gradients regardless of colorspace or settings, so there needs to be a bit of fudging there too. (In retrospect this is something that would have probably worked better with GNU IMP, which has native support for 16-bit grayscale images.)

Update: Nope GNU IMP’s UI is still complete garbage for this and wouldn’t have improved things. I guess in the future I’ll just want to, like, write code.

As far as uploaading the videos goes, I wrote a Python script which is rather involved in its setup (since it requires setting up a Google developer account and a “cloud application”) and which I can only run a few times a day due to the somewhat annoying way that YouTube’s API limits work. But my process is basically:

1. Encode all my videos (using the Bandcrash FLAC files as the input source)
2. Drag them (15 at a time) to the YouTube uploader
3. Add them all to a new playlist
4. Download the playlist metadata
5. Reconcile the playlist metadata with my Bandcrash album data to automatically generate titles and descriptions
6. Apply that new data to the YouTube videos and simultaneously schedule them for publication on release day

It’s a bit annoying but not nearly as annoying as having to hand-edit the descriptions and post schedule.

Some future things

I really want to do a proper music video for Wiener Dog on a Motorcycle. I’ve had a very strong image in my head for how it should look. If any animators are interested in taking it on as a gig, let me know. I need to at least do a storyboard and possibly an animatic myself, I think.

On top of all this I still have so many backburnered album projects, and of course I still have 25 days of Novembeat left to do…

1. This would be a music-only release, rather than the existing music videos playlist which has a bunch of non-music stuff in it and is missing the last track, which currently only appears in the full video. ↩

2. This will also coincidentally be the same intended day as the album release of Novembeat 2025, but that will already have been on YouTube since I’m using that as my primary incremental release mechanism. ↩

Hey y'all! As you might know, I coordinate an annual song-a-day challenge called Novembeat, where in November you try to make something musical every day. Several of my albums have been produced that way, and last year, in lieu of doing the traditional challenge (aside from a handful of low-effort experiments) I mostly used the month as a push to finally finish up Transitions.

I’ve always found Novembeat to be a very helpful thing for feeling unstuck with my own musical pursuits, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get a bit more practice with any aspect of the music creation process.

My suggestion is to only do it to the level for which you feel it’s helpful. Don’t burn yourself out on music trying to produce something if it isn’t flowing; the point is to challenge yourself, not to push yourself to the breaking point. Most years I haven’t actually done something every day, and getting anything done means there’s now more music in the world than there was before, and that can only be a good thing.

Anyway, think of this as an invitation to join in. Or if a weekly-ish cadence is more your speed, check out Song Fight!, which I wrote about recently.

Music distribution stuff

While it took a bit longer than expected, the removal of (most of) our music from streaming services has finally mostly gone through in most places.

To that end, we are finally starting to upload individual tracks to YouTube, although that process is going to take a little while. Rather than just put a bunch of boring thumbnail-and-audio videos up, I want everything to have at least some amount of a visual element. For Transitions it was easy enough to do visualizer tracks since those had already been done for the full album video, and of course I’d already done this for Novembeat 2021 and 2022 as part of the production of those albums, but for the other albums I’ll probably just be doing a simple waveform plot like I did for Strawberry Jams I Ate since that’s easy to automate.

Anyway, in other distribution news, a while back, I started drafting a specification called Canimus (the name is a Latin word that broadly means “we make music”) to allow music providers to syndicate their music easily, and I’ve been working with a few other folks to try to work out some of the hairier details. As it stands the protocol is ready for my own use case and for anyone who is just interested in publishing a feed to the public Internet, but of course there’s going to have to be some long-term thoughts around some of the trickier legal things to deal with. But there are also folks already building player engines, and Sockpuppet’s full catalog is available for streaming, at least.

Unfortunately the actual conversation is scattered between a few different spots, although it’s mostly being discussed on Mirlo’s Discord with some other conversations happening over on The Social Music Network, which is also a great community to join if you have any interest in talking about the future of independent music on the Internet. Ideally discussion about the protocol itself will take place on the Canimus GitHub discussions board.

Other musical projects

As far as music production goes, we are currently busy with the following:

• Actively working on the soundtrack for a video game
• Making music for a couple of ongoing clients
• Preparing for Novembeat

And the following album projects are currently on the backburner:

• The next album of Song Fight! and Song Fight!-adjacent songs
• An album of covers of other peoples' music we’ve done over the years
• An album of reimagining a bunch of our old songs into new styles or with updated sensibiliies
• A jazz album

As you might imagine, every member of the band is quite busy!