A lot of those niche, single-handedly maintained sites are still around. They haven’t been updated in a decade or two, but they’re still there. I’m in love with the idea of an eternal, personal information hub.

So I decided I wanted to be the change I want to see in the world and that I’d make my own hub built around a niche topic that I’m passionate about. Please excuse me for being vague, but I’m not quite ready to reveal what it is. For now, let’s assume it’s about Semi Trucks (which is another special interest of mine).

I’m building a site that is a hub for all you could ever want to know about trucks. But not the hub.

This site is going to span tons of pages with anything and everything I learn about trucks. It's going to be deeply personal and every bit of it will be covered in my fingerprints. I want to be part of the small web. I want to build up the small web.

But I'm stuck.

I want to make sure my site is future-proof

If my site is future-proof, it can live on for decades, just like the ones I mentioned earlier. But what does it mean to be future-proof?

Cheap and Portable

In my opinion, the ultimate future-proof website lives on forever because it can run on any web server and costs pennies to let it live.

What makes it cheap?

It's cheap when it doesn't need any special services. When it's just a bundle of files that gets served directly to the user.

What makes it portable?

It's portable when I can take the files, copy-paste them into some other host, and they’ll work without any further configuration or screwing around with settings and options.

What I'm building isn't cheap or portable

I'm halfway through building a fully custom CDN to support a fully custom CMS when I realize that I might be painting myself into a corner.

I mean, it's cheap, technically, in that I'm hosted on Cloudflare, which offers a lot of very generous services for free. But if I ever outgrow them, I'm committed to their services, because it's not portable.

I have a database, a serverless API, a bucket for assets, and a website. These things are all really cool and really fun to build, but they’re absolutely not portable. I’m locked into these services as long as the site exists in its current form. I don’t see Cloudflare going anywhere, but the doomer inside of me is a little anxious about putting all my eggs in someone else’s basket.

But it's going to be so convenient

Imagine being able to edit all the content of your website by logging in on the same site, from any device, and then just inputting text into some fields. If you’ve used WordPress, this is a very familiar concept. That’s essentially what I’m building: my own self-contained site that I can edit from within the site itself.

This is the most frictionless way for me to build up my site content

The easier I can make it for myself to edit and update all the good stuff on my website, the more likely I am to actually update and edit stuff. The site you're reading this on is very portable and very cheap, but adding and editing content requires me to edit the code directly and use special developer tools (git). And you can go see how often I update this blog.

Future-proof is a spectrum, I guess

There are a few ways I can build this site, each with its own pros and cons.

The most future-proof site is hand-written HTML and CSS with no JavaScript

Because of the way browsers work, anything written today in HTML and CSS will still work 100 years from now. It’s just text you want on screen and how you want to display it.

This type of site will run on literally every type of web host.

But it’s also the most tedious.

Writing longform text in HTML is a pain thanks to formatting that requires long tags like <strong> or <em>. Markdown solves the irritation by having shorthands for applying formatting to plain text (this very post is written in Markdown). But Markdown isn’t HTML.

If filling out the site content is tedious, I’m afraid I won’t commit to it. I know myself. I know that I’ll put off annoying tasks until I no longer think about the annoying tasks.

But I also really love the idea of hand-writing an entire website the same way our ancestors did back in the caveman times. (Love is not the same thing as discipline.)

The least future-proof is the most convenient

I’ve already described this version above. A website where all the content is managed from within the site itself is maximum convenient, but it requires building out a ton of infrastructure and committing to someone else’s services.

It’s also the most fun

I get to play with all the shiny modern toys: CI/CD, buckets, databases, serverless backends, front-end frameworks. It’s a blast, it keeps my skills sharp, and it’ll look really good in a portfolio.

The portfolio idea is part of the problem

A full-stack solution to a common real-world problem is probably the ideal type of project to include in a portfolio. At a time when there’s a lot of uncertainty in the world, I feel like a strong portfolio is never a mistake.

Maybe there's a balance

The website you're reading this on (unless you’re reading from my full-text RSS feed) is a balance. It has a big tech stack with all sorts of conveniences for developers, but it compiles down to a static bundle that can be served almost anywhere. I could build the new site just like that. All the assets and content live next to the code.

I could also build up the site with the plan of being able to ‘eject’ it somehow—dump all the assets from the bucket and database, stick them somewhere next to a static version of the site, and then shove that into a zip file. It’s a big “what if” and very much a digital version of a prepper mindset.

Or I can just put all my eggs in the Cloudflare basket and hope that if something ever happens to them in the future, I have the time and desire to migrate the site into something else.

The dilemma

Do I go fully future-proof and write everything by hand, knowing that it’ll be tedious?

Do I build my portfolio, have fun playing with modern technologies, and risk the site's future on today's choices?

That's all. You'll be able to listen and find links to all the other places to listen on the official website. Can't wait for the listeners to be everybody except for me 😁.

This is going to get technical, sorry. I'm going to do my best to simplify junk and remove jargon but I have a feeling it's going to get out of hand.

The way it actually works is that the Markdown is converted into React components when a request is made. Then that stuff is converted into HTML on the server, has a little bit of Javascript tacked on and then sent to your computer. This lets me do all the cool flashy Javascript stuff that people both love and hate. The cool thing is that this site mostly works without Javascript, so go ahead and disable it, I don't mind. The exception is my cocktails tool that is in a constant state of being unfinished. Eventually I'll make it work without relying on Javascript, I just haven't put the effort in yet.

So why is my website so complicated?

In my day job I'm a React developer, and I often like to fiddle with new and trendy React stuff on the weekends. This website is the perfect place for me to tinker. And since I know React well, I can move quickly when I need to customize something.

So what's the thing I reverted?

I wrote a custom parser that would read Markdown files that contained metadata in some front matter (a list of data at the top of the file). It assembled all the data into a format that is then used to generate React components on the fly. The reason it's a custom parser is because it also powers my RSS feed which is also fully custom so that I can serve the full content of my posts as RSS so readers don't need to leave their favorite app.

There's a thing called MDX, which is a goofy hybrid of Markdown and React flavored Javascript. I rewrote all of the generated pages so that they used the MDX parser instead of my custom one, which worked really great when the server ran on my computer. Was able to remove a lot of code and simplify how the pages are generated.

Unfortunately Cloudflare (where this site is hosted) threw a fit because of the Javascript runtime it has. I had it nearly working when I realized that my development environment and hosted environment were becoming substantially different and I decided to pull the plug before it became a maintenance nightmare.

I still have other future dreams for this site

It currently uses Tailwind for CSS, but I've decided that I no longer enjoy working with it. It ends up cluttering up the markup with a bunch of cryptic class names. I plan on removing Tailwind and instead using CSS Modules which moves the styles outside of the Javascript but enables me to have cool bitesize chunks of CSS that is far less likely to collide with other styles.

I want to make this site entirely static. All the Javascript stuff that needs to run to generate this site will all be done at build time before I upload the site to wherever it'll be hosted. Being static means it can pretty much exist on anything that serves a website. Won't need all the crazy fancy stuff that Cloudflare offers. I might even make it generate a version of the site that doesn't contain any Javascript. How cool would it be to have an overly complicated Javascript build system that outputs a small website in basic CSS and HTML that I could have just written by hand?

I want to build a nice music player that will persist across pages so that you can navigate around while listening to my music (I'm aware that this is at odds with the Javascript-free version I mentioned above).

What's the tech?

Here's the nerd stuff.

• Modern Font Stacks
• • Why should I make you download a font when you already have some excellent choices?
• Typescript
• • It makes Javascript good
• Node.js
• • If you've read this far, you probably already knew this
• Next.js
• • I use both the app and page routers because I'm easily distracted
• Markdown
• • Plain ol' Markdown with some front matter in the form of YAML
• Tailwind
• • A clever CSS framework that lets you stack up a bunch of classes instead of having to write CSS
• • I don't care for the clutter
• Cloudflare Pages
• • It's free
• • It automatically builds and redeploys my website when I make code changes
• • It can run beta versions of my code so I can test it
• • It caches pages and since my site rarely changes it doesn't need to run my code that often
• • It feels like overkill but it's fun to tinker with it
• Gitlab
• • It's where my code lives and when I went to go grab this link I noticed that they made their front page all about advertising some AI thing they have going on which is annoying

A friend gifted me a half-gallon wooden barrel for Christmas, knowing that I liked to ferment my peppers before making hot sauce. Since that's how Tabasco is made, I was very excited.

I purchased approximately 50 habaneros, which was most of the ones that my small-town grocery had in stock. I fermented them with filtered water and salt in the barrel for two months.

It fermented just fine, and the peppers had a good taste, but I was overall disappointed with the resulting sauce. The ratio of liquids to solids was far too much in favor of the liquids to be what I really wanted. In hindsight, I should have drained off some of it or (even better) fermented even more peppers. Fifty was not nearly enough for the size of that barrel. I'd estimate that 200 should have been the minimum.

In the end, the hot sauce was far too thin and separated too easily. I added a small amount of xanthan gum, which significantly improved the consistency and prevented separation. But there just wasn't enough of the pepper in the sauce to be what I really wanted. It's fine, but it was definitely a miss. In the future, I'll drain off all the liquid, then blend the peppers, then add the liquid back in until it's the consistency I want.

The other big disappointment is that the barrel didn't end up giving much of an interesting character to the sauce. The heat and flavor of the habaneros themselves blew any of that away.

But there's a silver lining. The barrel absorbed the delicious habanero flavor, so I filled it up with my favorite Tequila and gave it a couple of weeks. The result was the most delicious Tequila I've ever tasted. It's also so hot it's almost undrinkable, but it makes for a good (very slow) sipper or a zippy addition to a margarita.

It was all worth it for the Tequila.

At the moment I've moved it to Cloudflare Pages, but I'll be looking around a bit more before I decide it's permanent. Unlike Netlify, Cloudflare will disable your site if the usage hits a massive spike, rather than sending you an enormous bill.

I intended to create a more interesting blog post, but I overlooked the accessibility of the current site theme when I built it. So for the last five months, it's been failing a handful of tests. I've fixed those, but no time for anything else.

I have a handful of things I'd like to write about soon. I'll make a list to remember and update with links later.

• Barrel aging hot sauce
• Building a tool for organizing my favorite cocktails
• A retrospective on Walk the Earth
• A post for each guitar I've built
• Something about the Tone Master Pro I just got

I also put together a quick About page, but it's barebones for now.

Taking some inspiration from Simone Silvestroni, I'd like to have a lot more of my personal interests and projects here, rather than it just being a landing page for my music.

To me, mixing is a lot like sewing. When you sew, most of your time is spent getting prepped or cleaning up the project. Hardly any time is spent at the machine by comparison. You've got to measure, cut, fold, press, organize, triple check everything, and probably more I don't know about (I'm self taught by trial and error.)

Mixing is listening, comparing, referencing, note taking, etc. The tweaking of dials is the same thing as sitting at the sewing machine, the process is only effective because of everything else that goes on around the project.

Take notes

I've read a lot of stuff on how to listen and compare, how to find references, how to choose which things to adjust, but I've hardly read about note taking.

Note taking starts before the song is even done recording. Stuff like goals and ideas. Things you'll probably forget way down the line when you actually get to the mix.

Note taking continues as you work on a song, listening back and writing down thoughts, keeping track of the current state of the thing and the thought processes behind the decisions.

And it really comes into force when you're analyzing the album as a whole.

I have a lot of good notes, some that have saved my skin, but I'm always improving on my notes.

One quick tip

Listen to The Thing, write down all the good notes you can, then take a break for a couple days. When you come back to The Thing, don't look at your previous notes until you've listened again and written a second batch of notes. Comparing the two sets of notes will result in a ton of clarity.

So how's that album?

Hey, thanks for askin'. The album itself is taking far longer to complete than I had anticipated. It's one of those things where it takes as long as it takes. I'm behind where I wanted to be, but I'm sure glad I never said any dates out loud.

I'm in the mixing process currently. So the album isn't done, but I'm deep enough into it to have given my Obsidian method a fair shake.

My heart's desire

I wanted the ability to quickly move between songs to prevent fatigue and to discourage my tendency to make a bad result worse by riding it into the ground. I'm happy to report that I succeeded on both fronts. I'm able to keep myself fresh by slowly bringing the bottom of the whole album upward at once, rather than only a song or two at a time. With some discipline, I also mostly avoided digging holes that were too deep.

So let's review my needs:

Be able to see the status of an entire song, e.g. writing, recording, mixing, done

Yep!

Be able to see the status of individual instruments/tracks within the song, e.g. writing, scratching, recording

Yep!

Be able to quickly change the status of something

Yep!

Be able to add notes to songs so that I can remind myself what needs done or for details of the current state of the song

It's possible, but my lack of discipline prevented me from really utilizing this

Be able to take notes or view statuses on any of my devices

Maybe? I haven't needed this feature yet. Maybe when it comes time to write down mix notes when I'm doing a car test I'll put it to work. But it turns out I didn't really need it.

Have the lowest possible friction, so that I actually use the danged thing

Yep yep! I didn't make full use of everything I intended, but it was a result of poor discipline, rather than tools getting in my way.

How did the Kanban board work out?

It was great. Hands down the best feature. Having small cards and specific boards meant that I could quickly get in and get out of a board without wasting any time on fiddling with tools, leaving more time to fiddle with the music tools instead.

Once a week I like to go top down through each song and check the status of each board with what's actually in my DAW. Sometimes I let it get behind, but updating the status in the boards only took moments. Doing this little bit of book keeping also helped keep my thoughts fresh for each song (which would have worked better if I was a better note taker).

How about note taking?

As you already know, I didn't do a very good job taking notes. Wasn't the fault of my method or tools, I'm just lazy.

I did take some notes sometimes and was always thankful when I did.

What about the master status page for each song where you could see notes, status, and whatever else combined in a single view?

Hardly used it. Since everything was text based with good file names in a directory structure in a single application, it was easy enough to just open the files I wanted and take a quick look. I'll likely remove these pages on future projects.

How did it work out on multiple devices?

I thought I would need this feature but have never actually used it. Let me check quick and see how it goes. Be right back.

...

Eh, never mind on that. I would have used iCloud to sync it with my phone, but that requires some fiddling in the file system and I just can't be bothered with that now. The only use case I can see for this now is for taking notes on mixes when I'm doing a car test.

It won't be a big deal if I just want to use my phone for notes later. Just have to put the vault somewhere on iCloud where Obsidian on iOS can see it.

That wouldn't cut it for working on multiple computers. There's two options for that, Syncthing and Obsidian Sync. The former is dead simple and can be had for free, but you have to get iCloud involved if you want to sync with iOS and Obsidian. The latter is probably the easiest solution, but it requires another subscription and I'm sick to death with subscriptions.

So how low friction is the method?

It's the lowest friction project management that I've ever applied to myself. As one guy working on one thing, it's perfect. I'm not sure how it would scale. A couple people working in dropbox (or similar service) could probably get a lot of miles out of it too.

Any cool discoveries?

So Finder (it's the file explorer on a Mac) has a view that shows directories as more of a tree, just like Obsidian. Being able to work with my files exactly the same way in all my tools was liberating.

Any big wins?

The biggest win was keeping me on track with songs that I would have neglected. Some songs are darlings that I want to spend every moment on, and others are challenges that intimidate me. Without a high level view I'm far more likely to spend all my time with the darlings.

Whenever I felt fatigued or like I was spinning my wheels I'd pull up my boards and see which song is the furthest behind. I could jump into it immediately and take care of some quick business or I could use the opportunity to prepare for the next day/session if it was a difficult one.

Right now, I've got a good baseline mix across most of the songs, except a really troublesome one that needs some tedious work and maybe even a fairly substantial re-recording. I'm able to plan for that and get myself mentally prepared because I know exactly what the status is. If I was still doing cowboy project management (i.e. nothing) I'd have pushed it out of my mind because it's unpleasant. And then I'd really be regretting it when it's all that's left.

The other huge win is how easy it is to back up the project directory. The Logic project files are big, but they're also just directories. It's all directories all the way down. And this system only introduces text files. Teeny tiny text files. So I have my main project directory, which is backed up to iCloud and an external drive. And thanks to Syncthing it's also backed up on my PC.

Easy. Peasy. Lemon. Squeezy.

Any big losses?

None. The only thing was the lack of notes, which is my own danged fault. Because everything is light weight, based on a directory structure, and plain text, it never got in my way. It never broke anything.

Plain text is the future.

Speaking of future. Didn't you have future plans? How did they work out?

Talked about renaming directories so they're based on song order. I didn't do that. Never felt the need to, wouldn't make a difference to my workflow at all. Instead I just have a text file with the order in it.

Talked about Git. Never considered it again after writing that post. I'm sure it'd work tho.

Talked about a plugin that would automatically adjust master status on the master Kanban. I'd still like to do that. It'd be lovely. I just don't have the time. (Maybe one day)

Last thoughts

Anyway, if you end up trying any of this out, especially if you find handy ways to apply this workflow, let me know by hitting me up on Mastodon. Or I guess any of the other socials listed on the home page. Even if you disagree with me.

I decided to manage my album production inside of Obsidian. This is how I organized it. This workflow was heavily inspired by Simone Silvestroni's Ebook, Efficient productivity for music professionals.

Desired Workflow

The first step was to decide what I wanted my ideal workflow to be. I previously had tried to manage album recording using Trello, but it was difficult to bend it to my workflow. I stopped using it entirely because of the inconvenience. However, it was really useful for revealing my process.

I like to rotate between multiple songs at a time in order to prevent fatigue, but this causes me to lose track of my progress unless I write it down. I want to see my progress on any song to help prioritize what I need to work on next.

So here's a list of my needs:

• Be able to see the status of an entire song, e.g. writing, recording, mixing, done
• Be able to see the status of individual instruments/tracks within the song, e.g. writing, scratching, recording
• Be able to quickly change the status of something
• Be able to add notes to songs so that I can remind myself what needs done or for details of the current state of the song
• Be able to take notes or view statuses on any of my devices
• Have the lowest possible friction, so that I actually use the danged thing

It's obvious that some sort of Kanban board is the solution for me, and I already use Obsidian for writing chords and lyrics. Since Obsidian has a Kanban plugin, it seemed like a no brainer.

Be able to see the status of an entire song, e.g. writing, recording, mixing, done

This is probably the most simple part. I made a Kanban in Obsidian and added a card for each song. As work on the song progresses, I'll move the card to the right until it's done. Ideally, this board would update dynamically based on the individual song statuses, but it's not that much more work to move them myself.

Here's my Kanban lists for songs and what they mean:

• Not Started
  • Self explanatory
• Concept
  • I'm noodling around with an idea, but it hasn't become a song yet. I've been giving this songs the suffix of '-jam' to show they're not a song yet.
• Writing
  • The concept has become a song. It's being fleshed out with a melody, lyrics, and arrangement.
• Scratching
  • Recording scratch tracks that will lead to the full demo. I keep a lot of stuff from the writing phase.
• Scratched
  • This is a checkpoint. This means I completed the demo, and it's time to record it for real. For the sake of a consistent sound, I'll get all songs to this point before I continue to the next list.
• Recording
  • Replacing all the scratch tracks with good takes
• Mixing
  • All recording for the song is finished, it's being mixed
• Done
  • Songs are done, now it's time to master

Be able to see the status of individual instruments/tracks within the song, e.g. writing, scratching, recording

I decided that each song was going to have it's own Kanban. In this current album, most songs have several instruments and trying to fit all their statuses into the cards in the main Kanban was messy and tedious to maintain. It has to be dead simple, because I'm lazy.

So each instrument gets its own card, and it progresses like any other Kanban. The Kanban plugin generates the board from Markdown so it's easy to add a base template to set up a new song.

Here's my Kanban lists for tracks in any song

• Not Started
  • A card for each track for a song will start here
• Writing
  • nailing down what the part will sound like
• Scratching
  • recording a full demo track
• Scratched
  • checkpoint, same as above
• Recording
  • same as above
• Reviewing
  • When I finish recording a track, I want to give it a few days before I review it again so I can listen to it with fresh ears. Having this list reminds me to check.
• Done
  • Track is ready for mix

Be able to quickly change the status of something

The previous section solved this already. When I was using Trello, I had a plugin with dropdowns for individual instrument statuses. It was slow and clunky and I hated it. It also wasn't supported by their mobile app, so it forced me to use their mobile site.

Be able to add notes to songs so that I can remind myself what needs done or for details of the current state of the song

This is where we really get to see the power of Obsidian. Each song has a directory, and each directory has three files: Kanban, Notes, Song. The Song file compiles all the other files in the directory into itself so that I can see the whole status at a glance. The song's card in the overall Kanban board also links to this file for easy navigation.

How does it compile? Obsidian has a special link syntax that displays the contents of another file: ![[FileName]]. Like any other Obsidian link, but with an exclamation point on the front.

That Song file looks like this

![[Song Directory/Song Kanban]]
![[Song Directory/Song Notes]]

And the directory structure looks like

Album Directory
 - Song Directory
 - - Song
 - - Song Kanban
 - - Song Notes

Be able to take notes or view statuses on any of my devices

This one is still mostly unsolved, but not because Obsidian can't do it, but because I put my project files in the same directory and I didn't want to screw around with syncing large files. I've thought about setting up Git and excluding project files, but I'm going to wait until the actual need arises. For now, it's not a big deal to take notes in another Obsidian Vault and copy them over as needed.

Why keep the project files in there? So that everything is in one place I can see in the directory tree in Obsidian. I'm very much an "out of sight, out of mind" kind of person.

Have the lowest possible friction, so that I actually use the danged thing

I'm going to have to write a follow-up after the release of this album to really know for sure if this was a success, but I'm fairly confident that this one has a better chance of sticking than my process in Trello. Since I'm able to leverage tools I’m already using the friction is super low.

So the final project structure is

Project
 - Song
 - - Song
 - - Song Notes
 - - Song Status
 - - Song.logicx
Templates
 - Kanban Template

Future Plans

When most of the songs have finished demos, I'm going to determine the track order. I'll do that by adding a number before its directory name so it'll become /1 - Song/ instead of /Song/.

I've mentioned Git. Depending on how much setup it takes, that might be a good way to work on multiple devices. Just have to exclude the project files.

I'd like to write a plugin that extends the Kanban plugin so that I can update the main status board dynamically based on the song boards, but that's going to have to wait until after I finish this album.

When I write my songs, I like to think that they're a work of fiction. They're fantasy. I write them as an escape, hoping I can invoke some sort of new reality, mostly for myself. I had put little thought into their actual meanings beyond entertainment.

Or so I thought.

Music is Persuasive

It seemed to me, especially from that discussion, that people want their songs to have a message, to communicate something. To be persuasive. That last one sticks to me the most. It's the sentiment I felt was most common amongst my peers. That if you're not trying to convince someone of something, you're not a talented songwriter.

I don't think that's how they really feel. It's something I've imagined.

'Impostor Syndrome' is the popular word for what I think leads me down that line of thinking.

Music is indeed persuasive, but not necessarily because the words are trying to persuade someone. It's persuasive by nature, simply by the way it makes us feel. How it tickles the monkey part of our brains.

The Meanings Behind My Songs

So do my songs have meaning? I reflected on it for several weeks, feeling like a hack. It should have been obvious to me, but I suppose it was a forest for the trees type situation.

It turns out that my fictional and fun songs have tons of elements that are pulled from my own life experience. Even the silly ones.

So they do have meaning. Lots of it, and some of it is very personal to me. I just wasn't being honest with myself.

This is a comfy place, I think. It lets people relate to them and enables them to find their own meaning.

Ask and I'll Tell

Personally, I like to find my own meanings in the songs I listen to, and sometimes I'm disappointed to learn the truth. But if you're the person who enjoys learning the details, you can always ask me. They're not secrets.

That was a bit of a ramble.

I'll try to keep the technical stuff to a minimum in favor of overall philosophy and keeping it clear for a layperson.

Previously on...

The site was previously built using Hugo, which is an excellent tool. It's crazy fast, the site it generates is lean and mean, there are a ton of out-of-the-box themes ready to go, and all the content is plain text in Markdown. But I'm not the right sort of webmaster.

Don't let this post deter you. If any of that sounds great to you, especially if you find an existing theme you like, you should definitely look into it.

So what went wrong?

Nothing went wrong with it, I just felt stifled by my own lack of knowledge and how long it took me to make the sort of modifications I wanted. I'm a tinkerer, and I can't help but get elbows deep into things until I've made them my own.

Hugo was tough for me because I was entirely unfamiliar with the type of code that it uses for themes and templates. I spent more time reading documentation and learning by trial-and-error than I did actually accomplishing my goals. It had become so tedious that I dreaded doing any maintenance or improvements, because I knew it would be a time sink. I'm already a full-time developer, and I don't want to spend my precious creative time doing stuff that feels like work.

The Present

So I rebuilt the site with Next.js since I'm a React developer and it's what I know best. It still generates a static website, but with more JavaScript. So while the site itself may not be as lean, I can make changes to it much more swiftly than before.

To put it into perspective:

It took me two weeks working an hour or two in the evening to build the original site, modifying an existing theme.

It took me three hours to re-create it in Next.js.

Other Improvements

I'm now using fonts that you already have on your machine. While the site may look a little different on different devices, there's one less thing you have to download. Text will now render instantly. I'm a little sad to leave behind the fun fonts (especially since Windows fonts leave a lot to be desired) but I think I can learn to live with it.

I removed the huge icon library (Font Awesome) and am now only adding in the individual icons that I need.

Images are optimized now, so they're a smaller download. Something I neglected to do in the previous version.

For you, the site is going to feel significantly faster, thanks to the way that Next.js handles switching pages.

Any Regrets?

None. The adventure into Hugo was a lot of fun, and I had some good learning. If building sites was my hobby, I would have gladly invested more time into it. I suppose the only thing that bums me out is that the site isn't as lean as it was before.

I've been asked by a couple people how I got my bass tone in my EP, Spiders In My Eyes, so here's a quick rundown.

My bass is a 5 string Steinberger with two humbuckers. I have the tone set as bright as possible with the bridge pickup at max volume and the neck somewhere around half volume. I play aggressively close to the bridge, somewhat over the bridge pickup. The pick is nylon DAVA pick, probably about 1mm. They have an aggressive tip and are heavy and the nylon prevents it from chirping too much on the strings.

I run the bass directly into my interface (a Scarlett 18i8) and record it dry.

All the effects on the track are stock Logic Pro plugins, but similar things are likely found in other DAWs. The important thing is to highlight as much attack as possible without losing too much of the bottom end.

Set the EQ

The first step is EQ. I like to flip through the presets until I find one close to what I'm looking for, sort of a "I'll know what I like when I hear it" kind of thing. Once I find something I like, I'll tweak it and adjust it to get it right.

Use an amp sim

Logic has some guitar amp simulations that are pretty decent. I grab one of three presets in the library, my favorite being "Modern Stack". I like it well enough that I don't tweak it much.

The important thing about this amp is that it really pushes the brightness. When I'm defining the bass sound, I want to hear all the stuff that isn't the pitch being played, like the pick on the strings or the strings smacking into a fret when I'm doing a big slide.

It's important that it's clean and bright with as little mud as possible. The bass is a feature, not just a foundation. Any distortion should be used sparingly. It's all about clarity.

Compression

I do something called parallel compression. Which I do with two identical bass tracks, except one is significantly more compressed. The main track, which is where most of the volume comes from, is usually left uncompressed. The second track is extremely compressed. Beyond any reasonable amount. I'm talking super squashed. So much that it's unpleasant on its own.

Again, I flip through a bunch of presets until I find something I like. A lot of times it's a drum preset. Then I max out the ratio.

Mix

Reduce the volume of the compressed track to zero. Put the main track at the volume that feels best for the track as a whole. From there, slowly increase the volume of the compressed track until you get the definition you want.

Summary

That's it. I just put a summary section here so you know it's done. I'm always learning and looking for more tips. If you've got any, hit me up on Mastodon or Twitter.