Author: Arend
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My Wish for Pride this Year is Solidarity with Immigrants
In this Pride blog, I’m speaking primarily to a queer audience, an audience that is, unfortunately, as is normative, mostly white, calling us in to greater solidarity and away from white supremacy. My wish for Pride is: I wish every white, US trans person who was crying “trans genocide” several months ago were just as…
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Use a Spring Reverb on an Organ
I always had such a hard time getting electric organs like B3s to sit right in a mix. Then I recently learned spring reverbs were first designed for use in electric organs. Armed with this knowledge, I put a spring reverb plug-in directly on the organ track, and wow. Problem solved. I had tried other…
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How I Celebrated Easter This Year
In which I do some liberation theology and critique American Christianity
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One Way to Fear Others Less
Traveling as a gender-nonconforming person is disquieting. But, and this may sound hokey, one thing that legitimately helps me fear strangers less is remembering that everyone is beloved. When I imagine someone deeply loves this stranger before me (who triggers something in me), so long as I know I’m deeply loved too, I relax a…
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A Bunch of Free Plugin Clones for Reaper and Beyond
Apparently Vlad G of TDR fame has made some clones of popular plugins in JSFX format! What a time to be a Reaper user. And there’s good news for you who use a different DAW. You can read about these plugins and get ’em here. Don’t be deterred by the lack of GUI—these are the…
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Spotify is a Digital Landlord
Spotify, Apple Music, etc. are rent-seekers. A rent-seeker capitalizes on something freely available, that could have been freely given, and charges a premium for it. Spotify et al are digital music landlords over their vassals, big record companies, and the rest of us serfs, in this new age under an emergent system of oppression which…
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A Dubious Account of the Invention of Poetry
It probably started with some weirdo writing down their thoughts, not using punctuation, but instead organizing thoughts line by line, slightly out of order, indenting some lines, but not others. Oh, and not indenting new paragraphs, because that would make those other indents look rather confusing, but instead showing new groups of new thoughts by…
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How I Use Obsidian to Pair Lyrics and Melodies
Obsidian is a note-taking app that I fell in love with a couple years ago for its ability to connect notes with wiki-style links. In my songwriting practice, I like to use the Dataview plugin for Obsidian to help me link lyrics to tunes and combine lyric fragments. I do this by way of tagging…