A good few weeks.

Week 202-203 saw me in Berlin for Loop – Ableton’s gathering of music-makers. I include it here as it was, for me, somewhat work-related: my practice has been orbiting around audio and music for a while, and I wanted to spend some time devoting brainspace to that – and meeting other musicians and creators. It was both a rest and a kick up the rear for my head, and that was ideal.

Whilst I was in Berlin, Richard was playing Twinklr on Radio 3’s Open Ear. Great validation to have an instrument we’d built played in live performance.

Work over this period of time had a few main focuses:

• Moving some prototype features of Selworthy into beta, and fettling some existing functionality
• Working on some project documentation for Good, Form & Spectacle
• Making a concerted push on Longcrag – a hardware development project of my own. The final output of Longcrag will, I hope, be some DIY kits for amateur musicians; in the meantime, I’ve sent the latest – hopefully final, but we always say that – revisions of the PCBs and Panels to OSHpark for manufacture. I’ve also spent some time on Octopart hammering out BOMs to help with costings and estimates; Octopart has proven to be a lifesaver. I’ve also begun thinking about documentation and packaging, though that still feels very hypothetical. Still, worth pushing end-to-end on something, so on the days I can spare for it, that’s where my head is.

It feels like a struggle sometimes, juggling all these different things, but when I write it down, it feels good: some product development, some client work, and pushing all these things forward. That’s a useful value of weeknotes, however late they are: being able to somewhat objectively quantify what I’ve been up to, and realise that the balance – whilst still fragile – isn’t as far from where I’d hope as I might think. Onwards!