By most metrics, my past year has been a categorical failure. I haven’t set foot in a recording booth since last summer. I haven’t dropped any music since January ’25. Despite that, behind the scenes, I have been experiencing my sharpest growth curves since the glory days of World Around Records.
Much of that is down to necessity and loss. My next beat tape killed my main music machine, an HP laptop limping into obsolescence. Thanks to intervention from the High Holy, I got it stabilized for two precious weeks, spending my free time printing stems, doing triage, and preparing for the end. It still wasn’t enough. I saved the album but I lost a lot.
Assessing everything in the archives, I’ve made a little under three hundred beats since 2023. That’s more accounting than bragging; mere hundreds ain’t much. This rap game is full of dudes cranking out that much material in a month or two, many of them far better than me. Quantifying the funk like this is a good reminder that I could always apply myself better. Hell, most of my best beats are the joints I forced myself to start when I wasn’t “feeling it.” The brain is a radio and the Devil is a liar.
I was already aiming to expand my toolkit, so losing my favorite DAW (Sony Acid 7.0 with zero plug-ins) for the indefinite future was fortuitous timing, as setbacks go. As much as I resent re-learning, there are few life skills more necessary to keep current with. Most of my growth in the past few years was hands on, fumbling through theory and harmony across frets and keys, dialing in the right sound on actual knobs and faders, programming breaks on the ol’ 202 and an Akai XR-20. Tactile learning is what really sticks, everything else is just memorization.
More than anything else, though, 2026 has been a full circle back to the turntable. As I said in the liner notes for my first YETI MANE project, “producer culture is inextricable from DJ culture,” and this summer I have been living that every day. Crate digging is an extremely gratifying hobby. I will drive an hour to check out a new spot, paw through their entire dusty inventory, walk out with two albums and consider it time well spent. It is a blessing to be doing this in the hinterlands of Vermont, where there are few other diggers to compete with and many merchants don’t know what “Discogs” even is. That innocence won’t last much longer, but it’s mighty nice.
I reckon I’ve sustained my own innocence quite nicely. I remain as obsessively fascinated by music as I was growing up, poring over liner notes, listening intently and trying to understand how all these miracles come to exist. Finding the perfect finish for a rhyme scheme that’s been puzzling me for a month straight still gives me the same adrenaline rush it did when I was in high school. This is as close to a purpose in life as I’m likely to get, and I’m lucky I found it early. Lately, everything has been a revelation, a new understanding, a long loop finally coming to a close.
In retrospect, my ethos was set from the start. “Print to tape” is a modern mantra that harkens back to the dinosaur days of multi-track reels, ribbon mics and rackmount gear, but a lifetime of shitty computers with bare bones RAM forced me to work that way from the start. I’m grateful for the education, because it taught me structural synaesthesia: how to see the sequence of discrete steps it will take to achieve the sounds I’m hearing in my head. That involved a lot of dead-end, dumb-ass experimentation. As George Clinton told Amp Fiddler decades back, “the beauty is in trying new shit that doesn’t make sense.” To emphasize again, the most valuable breakthroughs I’ve had came only after forcing myself to stay frustrated & keep working.
In the past, I have only used Koala as a sandbox for re-working samples into melodic beds I could bring back into Acid. Lately, I’ve been learning the workflow for the full software suite with Samurai and Mixer so that I cook up from start to finish on the iPad. To that end, one of the most crucial acquisitions I’ve made in 2026 was a dinky little adapter cable that can port audio in through the Lightning power jack. This allows me to run DVDs, vinyl, computer audio and even instruments directly into anything I’m tinkering with. (Placing a AA battery upright over the Koala pad is a great way to set both hands free while recording.)
The fact that you can turn an iPad into an MPC clone for about thirty dollars remains insane to me. Koala really is a Tascam, Fruity Loops, Pro Tools grade disruption in music technology and economics. I am an old man but I’m a feral digital native, raised on piracy. My first decent beats were made on Cool Edit Pro, back when even a used MPC was out of reach, Ensoniqs were impossible to find, and the SP-1200 was a secret priesthood.
Speaking of which, one of my favorite tools lately has been Sonicware’s Liven Lofi-6, a clacky, clumsy, cheap plastic toy that sounds something like Heaven. The Liven series has a curiously bad reputation, mostly driven by a generation of adult children who demand instant gratification and refuse to read a fucking manual. To the rest of us, though, Dr. Endo is both mad genius and folk hero. After all, these little boxes are a microcosm of the artform itself: you have to put the work in to get anything worthwhile back out.
When it comes to a career, there are no such guarantees. Every genre is full of brilliant nobodies who put in work for a lifetime and never got much to show for it. As for me, I’ve been lazy as hell for decades and remain amazed that anyone, anywhere remembers my name. I am improbably fortunate and I aim to make better use of that gift in the second half of my life.
The goal, as ever, remains the same: making great albums. Those take a lot of time, especially for idiots like me. Rushing projects out the door is a mistake I will never willingly repeat. I’m grateful that, across my many dozens of forthcoming projects, the vision is clear. I sympathize with those of you who wish I hadn’t taken this long detour back into production, but it was all very necessary, and what’s coming will make that clear.
Know that I’m not slacking off. Know that I’m excited as hell. Know that I’m not going full Chinese Democracy out here in the backwoods of Vermont, doing ten thousand takes of the same sixteen, demanding Matt Scott give me his 91st mixdown of “Billie Jean.” I know exactly what I need to do & my collaborators trust me. Truly, God is great.
