frozen octopus

I spent some time relaxing in our hotel by searching for drum machine sounds. My three favorites are always Mini-Pops MP-3, Roland CR-78, and Casio SK-1. I always seem to end up gravitating to them.

When I was loading them into the Patterning app, I was struck by how different the wave patterns look compared to sound wave patterns I am used to seeing. The kick and snare wave patterns for the CR-78 look more like modern art than sound waves. I was expecting to see “www” but they look more like “O o •”.

The other thing I was noticing is that kick, snare, and high hats sound like kick, snare, and high hat. The rest of the sounds in the kits are really cool but I find myself wanting to rename them.

I’m still working out how to map out the drum pads. There are two rows of four. For the bottom row, I can’t decide between:

- Kick, Snare, High Hat, Snare 02
- Snare 02, Kick, Snare, High Hat
- Kick, Snare, High Hat, Open High Hat

It will get figured out. Just got to try each one a bunch of times and see which one clicks. Right now I like the having two slightly different snare sounds. I think there is a way to do the same effect in the Patterning app with the velocity setting.

It took a bit to settle on the drum resolution for 2026, but I finally settled on it. I am going to work on drum pads or "finger drumming," as some call it. I ordered an AKAI LPD8, which is a tiny portable drum pad setup I can use on iPad, Mac, and even iPhone.

It's not like I don't know how to drum on drum pads. I just am not that fast and smooth at it. It would be nice to be able to have the option of playing drum pads at shows where the place is too small to have a drum kit.

The next step for this resolution is to determine what success looks like. It is kind of hard to determine right now because I think I need a day or two with the drum pads to get to know them. I want to say being able to play a 1000s of cats song from beginning to end is the goal. I don’t know if that goal is too easy or not until I spend a chunk of time with them.

I've also been doing some rumination about parameters. With anything that can play samples, the options are infinite. You can literally play any drum kit or drum machine ever invented. I want to eliminate that kind of choice and just get down to playing.

This means picking a couple of kits and just pretending all the other ones don't exist. So I've chosen an analog kit option and a digital kit option. I will be "stuck" with these two for 2026.

The digital kit will be the CR-78. It is a drum machine from 1978, which I love. You'll know it when you hear it in a bunch of hits from the late 70s and early 80s.

For an analog drum sound, I am limiting the choice to my kits. I can use any drum sound that is me hitting the drum. It can be from old albums, or I can sample myself.

Applications are infinite as well. I am narrowing it down to a couple to just get rid of choice paralysis. The two apps will be Patterning and Koala. Both are extremely well-made Apple apps that I have loved for a while. I am really stoked to mess around with them using actual drum pads.

Brainstorming what I should do for my New Year challenge for 2026. I like having a loose theme for the year that levels me up a bit. Usually it is some sort of drum thing.

Past challenges were stuff like learning jazz and linear drumming. It isn’t always drums though.

For the upcoming year I am kind of leaning towards a music listening challenge.

One idea is to only listen to music released in 2026. Another idea is to only listen to Japanese music. I haven’t settled on it yet and there are still two weeks to go.

I keep flipping sides on drum or listening even as I write this. I really should choose an area that takes something that makes me nervous or anxious and level that up.

If I went that route then it would be podcasting. Talking in a microphone makes me anxious for sure. We’ll see.

When I was trying to move my phone number to a new iPhone Air, I could not get a six-digit activation code from Softbank. I was stuck in a loop which my AI, and two staff members couldn't sort out.

Finally, someone at the Softbank store in Ginza figured out what was happening. I had Private Relay turned on, which was blocking the code from arriving via text.

We turned it off, the code came, got my phone number transferred, and I turned Private Relay back on.

Search for "Relay" in Settings and you'll see the spot right away.

Drafts application is where I spend a large part of my time on my laptop. In the application there are Actions that you set up to process the text you add to a draft. There are tons of them so you can customize your actions to be your perfect text command center.

One action I use so much, and take for granted, is the "New draft from each selected line" action. It takes a list and separates the list item into their own draft.

For example, in the morning I open up Drafts or a text editor and pour my mind into it to get all the things I need to do or are buzzing in my head out of my head. I do it in a giant blob of text because formatting interrupts the process of getting things out of the brain. The problem with that is I have a giant blob of tasks and ideas that should be a list.

Then I process the blob of text with Apple writing tools using the List feature. I processes the blob and makes a list. Using the "new draft from each selected line" action I make each list item a separate Draft.

After that I can go through the list and process each item one by one. Usually what I have to do is:

1. Store thoughts into their spot (reference file or list)
2. Make an event on the calendar
3. Make a task in reminders

For the third one, there is usually three or more things to get into Reminders. Drafts has a way to process them all at once. If you select multiple drafts, you can run an action on all of them. I have a "Add to Reminders" action I run that processes them all.

This looks like a long process but beyond typing out the things in my mind, this takes seconds to do.