gm #plebchain

Waking up with a big of a glow today. Time for a #longform post. #TLDR at the bottom.

So I've been participating in my first #nostrcypher thanks to the invite from @`Gek`. It's gotten me back in touch with a piece of myself that not long ago I was almost ready to completely let go of.

Like so many people, I've always gravitated to #music from a young age. #Piano at 5, #drums in elementary school, #guitar in middle school, a lot of #classical #percussion as I graduated high school and entered college. It was supposed to be my meal ticket, my soul, the whole deal.

But right alongside, I was fascinated with computers. My mom's job required that she have one at home since I was little, so I was super fortunate that we had a PC at home before Windows was a thing. I learned enough DOS to play some BASIC games my mom came home with.

Then one day she came home with a disk someone at her work told her I might like. It was called "Visual Player" and turned out to be a DOS visualization for MOD files. The disk also had a ton of MOD files. I spent hours loading up each MOD file and watching what happened when I loaded it in -- which, incidentally, included scrolling through the MOD code as the song played.

Eventually I discovered Impulse Tracker, which absolutely blew my world open. Suddenly I could open the MOD files in Impulse Tracker and reverse engineer how they were created. I could save the samples from the MOD tracks and rearrange them into my own stuff. I was instantly hooked and went down the rabbit hole hard.

I still have a lot of stuff I wrote with Impulse Tracker when I was in middle/high school. A friend of mine even surprised me with a CD he burned with it all of them on it -- which was one of my surprises to learn that other people listened to them too. It felt like a calling.

In parallel, I was playing drums in the school jazz band and also playing drums along to a lot of my favorite songs at home. I was super into metal and grunge and eventually nu-metal at the time. So I also started to pick up guitar. I discovered a thriving local music scene (how lucky was I?) and went DEEP playing in bands and going to shows. I made pretty much all of my lifelong friends during this period.

I ended up playing drums in a band called Trace Fury (very much NOT metal or grunge, but more like gothic piano-based stuff with two lead vocals) that was doing pretty well in the local scene. I was in college for Music Composition at the time, but left to give the band a shot. We got picked up by a manager who had just prior gotten another local band a multi-million dollar deal with J Records. Suddenly we found ourselves in a local studio cutting a demo we were going to shop to labels. I felt like I was living the dream.

The problem was that this was also where we had to bastardize our music to make it commercial-ready. It's not that I didn't still like it, but I didn't have the same love for it anymore. But I started to find myself loving sitting next to the #producer and being a part of that process. I ended up leaving the band, picking up a "cheap" Pro Tools rig and a few mics, and opened my own little pop-up studio in a storage container. It was a really fun time, but I didn't have the discipline to run a proper business. I did a lot of #recording, and there's a long story there, but suffice to say I got kicked out.

I had a couple stints at other studios in my 20s of varying quality. But to pay the bills, I picked up a job as a cable guy. That job went very well. I'm still at that company in a leadership role and it's sustained my entire life since.

Eventually I met my now-wife 12 years ago. We have two kids. Life is really good right now. But music got totally left behind in the process. I couldn't balance playing in bands, recording, working, and being a proper husband and father. It just became working and being a proper husband and father.

There's been a huge part of me missing for a decade because I couldn't balance it. I have so many half-done projects, and still have friends waiting for me to finish mixes we started years ago. I got very depressed and almost sold all my shit -- I actually listed a couple things on ebay and one sold, but I chickened out and didn't ship it (got the ebay slap on the wrist too lol).

I didn't mention that I also had a fascination with coding from a young age that I didn't properly explore, but it ended up helping me fall into #crypto and then #bitcoin a few years ago. Roundabout, I found #nostr, and very recently, #stemstr.

So I posted a song on Stemstr a couple weeks ago called "Room for Error," one of the few I had allowed myself to begin working on over the past couple years. I really liked it and didn't want it to die, so I put it up and thought "hey everyone, here's a thing I did. This site is cool."

To my amazement, almost immediately @`Gek`and @`manlikekweks`dropped VERSES for it. I was like WTF. This song is suddenly a thing again.

Incredibly grateful for people who are willing to meticulously organize and schedule the huge backlog of bugs and features on an open source project in their spare time: