Hey Reader, For weeks I watched a number that wasn't moving. I'd built The Finish Line Challenge, a 14-day way to take one song from the hard drive to actually done, and I sent it out into the world with no real idea if anyone would come. Sign-ups trickled in slowly enough that I started rehearsing the version of this where it quietly doesn't work. Where I built a room and nobody walked in. That waiting is its own kind of friction, and nobody warns you about it. You can finish the thing...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, Someone left a comment a while back asking what my tinnitus actually sounds like. Not "do you have it," which people ask a lot. What it actually sounds like. I told them the truth. It's not one tone anymore. It's several, different in each ear, all going at once. A kind of chorus effect on the sound, guitarists will know what a chorus effect does to sound, a gentle phasing up and down, and that's built slowly over thirty years, getting a little worse every decade until it stopped...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, It finally has a date, 27th July 2026. That is when I will be bringing a whole bunch of likeminded musicians together who all want to finish one song in 14 days. It will include daily encouragement and prompts/suggestions via email, a group WhatsApp tp bring everyone together, and the promise of no gatekeeping, no divas, and nothing demanding, just a bit of fun getting back into the grrove of making music for entertainment. You don't have to release it (if you don't want to). You...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, I once set up a band for a level check. Nothing serious, just get the mics roughly right before we started for real. I asked them to run through their most energetic song so I could get some sound in the room, check for peak levels, make sure I had no dud cables, etc. I learnt right back in the beginning to record everything, so as always I hit record. If for nothing else I could play it back for the band to see if they were happy with the overall sound. This time, they were on...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Quick one. New video just went up. It's about a question I keep getting asked — "do you still play?" — and the strange half-second pause a lot of musicians have before answering it. It includes a story I haven't really told publicly before, about a song I wrote for my mother's funeral, and a night in intensive care where I worked out what I'd actually been avoiding. It's nine minutes. If you know that pause too, you'll know what I mean by the end of it. Click Here to Watch it NOW!...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, Had a few old friends round on Sunday. At some point we found ourselves comparing aches and pains, and personally, tinnitus, which is apparently what happens when musicians reach a certain age. Matt and Lee came down from Nottingham. Tom came up from the Cotswolds with his fiancée. We sat in the garden for most of the afternoon doing what people who've known each other a long time do, which is mostly just talk. Lee and I went to a run of shows together in the nineties and early two...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, I spent two days last week mastering an album. Album 13. The artist is Martin and he records as After Daylight, shoegaze/ambient/post-punk, the kind of guitar music that sits somewhere between beautiful and deliberately uncomfortable. He was in a band that used to record and rehearse at Psyrex more than twenty years ago. The Death Notes if anyone remembers them. Now he works alone, at home, plugs straight in, uses emulators for his amp sounds, a drum machine for the rhythm, and...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, I didn't leave my day job because I was brave. I was a civil servant. Department of Transport, working on the digitisation of the driving theory test. Steady money, decent pension, the kind of job that makes sense on paper. And in the evenings and at weekends I was building a recording studio. Not renting one. Building one. Two computers from scratch. Cables soldered by hand. A live room and a control room, slowly taking shape while I was supposed to be doing something more...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, I've been ill this week. Nothing dramatic, a cough and a cold that took the legs out from under me and left me horizontal, well, sat in a chair, at an agle that is, for longer than I'd like. No studio. No writing. No creating anything worth the name. What I did do was read, listen, and think. I finished Iain Banks' Use of Weapons, which I'd been making sure I read at least 15mins every day for a few weeks now. And well you know what the end of a book is like, it gets harder and...
5 months ago • 2 min read