Hard to believe it has been over a year since I last wrote here.
To put things briefly, everything is still in a state of flux. My wife and I have somehow become unwitting Dharma Bums. We haven’t been hard-sleeping or missing meals, but we honestly have no “resided” somewhere since the start of 2024. Still haven’t exactly stuck the landing from Australia.
Not that everything has been bad; it has been quite the journey that we have been on. That’s not really a story for here, though. I’ll probably write a book about it someday.
The story for here is that I still have not had a workshop or anything like that. I had to let go of my guitar to make all the traveling a bit easier. Musically, I’ve been forced to work from a computer.
Around this time last year, I started making a video game. That game is out on Steam now. It’s a non-violent platformer about using music to heal. You eventually discover fuzz, and are able to save your little world with it. It’s a Bolt Fuzz.
Making that game forced me to take the plunge into VCV Rack. VCV Rack has honestly changed my life. I’ve been able to explore all the musical ideas I have wanted to bring to life. So far this year, I’ve actually released 50 albums under the name mountain cloud (reaching 100 total releases!). That is largely thanks to VCV Rack.
And that leads me to the actual point of this post: I’ve been unable to work in hardware, but using VCV Rack has taught me a lot of synthesis and given me some pretty interesting ideas. The first of which is that I’m porting Water to VCV Rack!
This is my first time really working with C++. I have no real estimate of when the module will be finished, but the idea is to take the features of Water and open up the controls to accept CV. I’m planning on releasing this for free. Someday, hopefully soon, I’d like to make this as a hardware module as well.
So that’s what I’m up to. This journey has always felt like “next week things will settle down,” and they really might. There is always a chance that in the next few weeks, I’ll be actually living somewhere and able to start building up my workshop again. But until then, I guess I’ll be on the computer.