Poster for Chicago Synth flea market at Marz Community Brewing in Bridgeport. Sunday March 15, 2026 1-6PM
If you're in Chicago come see what I've been up to next Sunday! I'll have half a table and some fun prototype gear to play with! Tons of other boutique and not-so-boutique vendors will be there too 🎸🎹🕺 #chicago #synthsky #marz #fleamarket
My cross-vendor ARM audio library is starting to do very synth-y things! Stay tuned for lots more on this front 👀 #synthsky #synthdiy #arm #embedded #dsp
I honestly can't wait for Steam Machines because I'm so ready to ditch Windows permanently 🤢
One time I came to in medias res and found myself arguing with Finn, Anthropic's customer service chatbot about whether Claude was being wasteful with tokens. It was at that time I knew that the 5 hour token limit was a good thing. 🤖
Ask me if the cable is good one more time, Claude. #agentic #fafo #embedded
Nice setup! How is that Multigrain treating you? I've been kinda pressing my pig nose against the store window on one for a while
I'm not afraid to admit it, I love C++! Fight me 🤺 #embedded #synthdiy
Awesome! Brings back nostalgic memories of snapping grainy pics of my Magic and Pokémon cards (for some important reason) on my clear purple gameboy color 🤩🤓
A half hour of video games in the morning is such a nice way to wake up 🤗
Gorgeous! Love your style
Where has feedback been my entire synth life?? I guess I was a bit scared of damaging my system or my hearing, but when used carefully I've really been enjoying the spectrum of feedback from adding some tasty saturation to high pitched howling and back! #modular #synthsky
I wasn't super excited about the Make Noise Multiwave because I usually don't gel with wave tables but then I played one at the music store! Absolutely killer sounds coming out of that thing. Pretty sure Tony & crew did it again 🤩 #synthsky #modular
Yeah hear that. I'm currently working with a Frankenstein system in 3 cases and only 1 is deep enough to hold them all.
And on the Doepfer topic, I also appreciate the build quality and component selection. Dedicated to keeping their modules repairable by keeping everything thru-hole and shipping boards with DIP sockets for easy chip swapping. I like that. #synthsky #modular
I've never drooled over them like Make Noise or Mutable, but all 3 of my Doepfer modules have quietly made their way into the 'indispensable' tier that never leaves the case. Maths, Pam's, @intellijel.com Quad VCA and Dixie II+. It's not crowded up there! #synthsky #modular
If you're working on a 'for serious' music project, don't forget to take time to play just for fun!
...continue passing those skills, tastes, and values refined over many generations to people younger than us. Thank you for attending my TED talk. In summary, support the arts!
People will always make great art. I worry that we will create less of it and that our communities will be worse off if we continue down the path of devaluation. I think there are so many ways art is necessary for the soul and a uniquely human gift. I also think there is so much lost when we don't..
...appetite for art and entertainment media has only ballooned. To fill the demand created by increased access and lower economic barriers, those with the means to scale and commoditize creative work did, relentlessly.
... and gaining social status as a journeyman artist or creative person is alien to younger generations. How widely accepted is the notion that STEM is safer and more respected than liberal & fine arts? That an arts education is an exercise in futility if not outright vanity. Yet if anything our...
...future. It's not just the demolition of attention spans and media literacy that gets me. It's the concerted reorienting of the very idea of valuing creativity, uniqueness and artisanship. It's been going on for a long time, longer than anyone alive remembers. The concept of earning a living...
One trend among many that I'm grumpy about is the sustained attack by tech & media companies and prolonged apathy from consumers on the value of creative work. I'm definitely that guy wringing my hands about what endless content feeds are doing to us. We're in a very 'the medium is the message'...
It sucks that modular synths are an expensive hobby, but I absolutely love the community and their willingness to support boutique and experimental instrument makers. For me it's a bright spot in the otherwise soul-sucking race to the bottom in consumer products & expectations! #modular #synthsky
...but I still think it's worth learning the fundamentals in order to build out a better architect toolbox. No doubt the skillset needs to evolve, but that's par for the course in computer science.
That's a great analogy. Truly, I think beyond really cutting edge techniques or intense performance requirements, most seasoned engineers come to view most coding as mostly mechanical. Any dev can learn to write the code for a well architected and spec'd component. Coding alone will be devalued...
And I really don't think we can hand wave our way past the communication gap. *Maybe* AI will magically become so adept at gleaning our true intentions, or the iterative process becomes so fast that it doesn't matter that most people don't know what they want. Not sold on that yet.
... it will cease to be useful to employ humans who have a deep understanding of the product. I think a lot of companies will find out the hard way that even describing in natural language what you want software to do is quite difficult if you don't understand the underlying systems and capability.
If you're a software engineer or adjacent and you're concerned about AI automation, you might consider that understanding software at the code level is likely to be an increasingly rare skill. Lots of companies will choose the short term profit gains of automation, but I'm skeptical that ...
Close up of lower bottom Gatekeeper PCB showing the Sound Byte Labs logo
Shot of the bottom of the Gatekeeper PCB
First power of the Gatekeeper prototype did not result in any obvious shorts or heating! Additional testing and first firmware dump later today! Excuse my awful hand soldering 💀 #synthdiy
The manual suggests feeding the Bruxa output back into the input, so I'm going to try that next! #makenoise #synthsky #modular
