Slowly and with mild suffering I get a little better at synthesizing, and piano-ing. I learn the workflows, study the processes, try to internalize the difference between Bach's counterpoint driving a minuet and four-chord pop progressions. All in all it makes me a better listener, and it gives me something to do that isn't staring at social media, or drinking, or working, or panicking about work. But as time goes on I find myself drawn to a few really nice bits of gear, over and over—which leaves piles of pedals and other, beautiful stuff floating around the room, actually gathering dust. (I have a special synth brush, which is the same as the thing they sweep the back of your neck with at the barbershop. It gets under the knobs.)
For a long time I thought the goal was to wire it all together—to make dozens of pieces into one, coherent analog-digital instrument, and so I tried to get all the sounds: Analog mono, analog poly, wavetable, FM, sample-based, each with a variety of genealogies going back, sometimes, a century. I did avoid purchasing a theremin, but I also did purchase a large, expensive soft pad with 128 buttons that provides a sort of alternative, pressure-sensitive keyboard. And a lot of other gimcracks.
For a long time I didn't want to sell anything, because I liked the luxury of having a lot of stuff, but then, today, they came to put insulation in the attic. The attic is filled with empty boxes—you have to keep the boxes to resell this stuff. I had to pull out all of them. It's a lot of boxes.
One of the boxes was heavy and I wondered what it was, and it was my father's manuscripts—what remained after I archived his writing and put it online. The synth stuff started happening when he began to fade. And somewhere rotating around in my head a few loose pieces glued together—it's not so simple as to say that noodling with music was how I grieved my father; it's more like—he was, alas, often an absence in my life, especially those long fading decades at the end, and sound, to me, is the absolute opposite of absence. Sound is present. Sound fills you and surrounds you. It's immediate, reactive.
I am a bad practicer. I always want to be doing something else. But I cherish the little loops that emerge: You ride the bicycle and your legs move and you go. You play the piano and the sound is bad but you practice the same measure a thousand times and it sounds better. And you start to get the sound from your brain to your fingers to your ears. Steady but earned improvement is the opposite of an era in which you ask a chatbot to build a website and it does. Maybe when we do UBI we let everyone choose an instrument.
I don't feel the same way about prose. Writing doesn't have a loop. It's not present. You have to imagine the reader, then defend yourself against them. Writing in 2026 is more like a tower defense game where you set up waves of defenses and social media knocks them over.
So it's been good, filling absences with sound, and studying old manuals, and writing a hundred little songs, all of them bad. I've learned enough to know that the variations between all these different audio gadgets is manageable. I can get pretty much any sound in my head out through six or seven key bits of gear, and of course the computer can do all of it a million times better than any other device—it’s the ultimate sound generator but no fun to play as an instrument. The sound doesn't need stuff. I can sell it, and I'll be lighter for it, and will have fewer options, and that will let me make more sounds.
It is, frankly, an embarrassing spreadsheet. In a week, after I've gathered everything and assessed it, and put it in its original box, I'll send the list to the synth shop to request consignment. They're very nice. Then I'll have to get it all over there, which will actually be quite a chore.
I could get paid out in cash but I'm pretty sure I'll store credit. It's not like I'm done here. Just moving along.
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