June has been a bit all over the place for me, work-wise. On the home front, I’m excited that my wife and I bought a new home in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle (where we live now and where we met). Among the many reasons I’m excited about our new home is that I’ll have a dedicated room for working; I’ll be able to move out of my office. My office situation is great–it’s been a godsend for my productivity and focus–but it’s also not ideal because I can’t make much noise. Most of the office clients are therapists–both massage and psychology. That means I mix mostly in headphones, and I play only electric instruments. Considering I want to be playing mandolin most, that’s somewhat limiting to my sound. So, yeah, all the tracks I’ve started for my next album don’t have any parts yet with what I hope is a primary instrumentation. Soon that’ll change! Well, unless the other “tenant” in our two-office workplace tells me she wants less noise.

And speaking of new homes, I also have a new digital home. The very observant recipients of this newsletter will note that this email is coming from a new email address. That’s because I decided to set up a separate website from bigstitch.music. The new website is scottmiles.studio. The website bigstitch.music isn’t going anywhere. Only having a digital home for Big Stitch (like this newsletter and my blog) was limiting for me. Big Stitch is the name that I release music under (and maybe someday find others to join me under that name). But I want to do more than that, in music, sound art, and podcasting. Not having a more general digital home kept me thinking that I should only post things–for example–about Big Stitch. So then I had to hope that folks would guess I offer services like freelance audio engineering or podcast producing, which is unrealistic. So scottmiles.studio now hosts my blog and newsletter (I use WordPress for both–no Nazi-hosting Substack for me). It will be my digital garden, so to speak, where I put anything that isn’t formally released music or artist-specific information, like when it happens, gig dates.