Making electronic music. Sharing what I learn.
Newsletter 👉
Joined March 2008
- Tweets15.4K
- Following288
- Followers4.7K
- Likes27.8K
One of the most useful things I’ve done for making music was setting up a template in Logic.
Drum bus, reverbs, delays. All the stuff I kept adding again every time I started something.
Now I open a project and get to work on the music.
Starting feels a lot less daunting when half the setup is already done.
Would love to go back to a time when I wasn’t asked for a review every time I bought a product or service.
Shared a snippet of an idea I’m working on.
A DJ replied: “I’m gonna need this 🥰”
Now I’ve just got to finish the bloody thing.
The 9 albums that made me.
Looking at this, it’s pretty obvious I was heavily into rock, metal and grunge, particularly between the ages of 15 and 18.
There’s also a bit of influence from my dad’s record collection in there.
Dance music came later, at university. Club nights, Radio 1 Essential Mixes, Judge Jules, Euphoria compilations, and eventually Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy.
Funny how your musical tastes evolve, but those early albums never really leave you.
Could easily have picked another nine.
One thing that surprised me about releasing my first track was how easy it was to get it onto Spotify and Apple Music through a distributor.
Seeing it there felt awesome. Bit weird too.
Then nobody listened until I started pushing it on TikTok and YouTube.
Getting it released and getting it heard turned out to be two very different things.
Just had a bit of an epiphany… bounced my 8-bar loop from Logic, uploaded it to Suno and heard how it could work as a full track.
My core idea, taken in directions I wouldn’t have thought of.
I’m using it as a reference for arrangement ideas. Already itching to get back into Logic and try a few.
If you’ve listened to an 8-bar loop for an hour and you’re still moving to it, it can mean one of two things:
1) You’ve got something worth turning into a track.
2) Your ears are broken.
got a lead that I more than 50% happy with. And a vocal that doesn’t suck (may change later)
think it’s time to do some arranging.
A friend played a couple of my tracks in a dj set on TikTok live last night.
Listed to those tracks hundreds of times whilst making them but hearing someone else play them hits different.
Never gets old.
seriously, if this 50yo who can’t play an instrument and knows almost zero music theory can learn to make electronic music, release tracks AND make some $ from streaming, then I don’t see why we can’t have flying cars.
Just noticed this track now over 4000 plays.
Not going to get rich but has paid for a few beers 🍺
If your audience is tech savvy nerds, then I think this is happening.
But for everyone else I think it’s a long time before they have agents handling their emails.
a big take I've been noodling on and I’m ready to call:
the newsletter is dead
@every's core business is a newsletter with 120k+ subscribers so I don't say this lightly.
persistent agents mean i dont look at my inbox
with dots (GrokBots, Muse, etc) I almost never look at my inbox. if I do it's for a specific thing I need to reply to.
i think in a year I'll be doing all of my email this way - fully filtered by my dot / something like it.
this is not new: it's a continuation of the trend of having a “newsletter” folder in Gmail, but 10x more filtered.
what it means
It doesn’t mean people won't read newsletters, but it does mean that getting a person’s email is no longer the guarantee that you have a relationship with them that it used to.
luckily, with persistent agents (and AI coding more generally) there is an entirely new playing field to build relationships with readers. instead of fighting to get an email address, publishers and creators will need to make sure we're installed in our reader's agent harness of choice, so that they get directly notified when we do something new.
we're already starting to experiment with this @every with our MCP and the frontier alerts we send users of our slack agent (every.to/agent)
it's also more affordable than ever for publishers and creators to build their own platform ecosystem: you can have your own website, app etc. and you can use AI to publish 100x more high-quality stuff to your community—so we may see a world where many creators themselves are running their own little empires that have their own apps, feeds etc.
to be clear: It'll take a while before this actually happens, but the idea of getting someone's email creating a direct relationship with them is over.
here's a set of predictions I made 3 years ago about AI and media that panned out pretty well: every.to/chain-of-thought/we…
Always had a lot of respect for Metallica even if I’ve not been a huge fan of their releases since 1991.
That respect went up a notch today 🫡
Damn I love AI.
Forget all the “stolen art” nonsense or vibe coding your own tools. It just makes stupid little daily personal admin tasks easier or completely removes them.
Love it.
