Musicmaking – Scott Miles Studio

Towards Effortless Composing

Yesterday, the biggest issue I faced was getting tense while working on music—literally clenching my jaw while playing. I’m taking this too seriously. I’m currently working on an instrumental song I’ve randomly called “Tasty Message.” I’ve reached that exciting point where I know it has enough interesting ideas and material to become a full arrangement, so I’ve mentally moved it to the “arrange” stage in my project management system. But now I’m finding it challenging to connect these good ideas. Too much good material? Ha! In trying to compose transitions and through-compose from the good ideas to find workable variations, […]

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Developing main characters

After a couple weeks on vacation and recovering from a nasty cold, I got back to creating music. I met with my coach on to review one of my song ideas, Quirky Digestion (and randomly generated name). The big revelation? I realized even when I think I’m developing a song idea I often stay stuck in brainstorming mode. I keep jamming out new ideas instead of developing the good ones I already had. Alex helped me identify the main “characters” in the track—the core musical elements that I wanted to be the focus. They were what I already knew were

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Live mixing to kickstart arrangements

I’m working on my second album as Big Stitch. (Regretfulnot is my first.) I’m following a general approach that I’ve outlined here and here, which is inspired by (and personally coached under) Alex Joyal’s approach. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been jamming out ideas — brainstorming possible elements for future album tracks. As I documented, I used Loopy Pro to jam ideas. It was the first time using Loopy Pro. I really enjoyed the software (really, really). I discovered that live looping is a highly fruitful way for me to generate and develop ideas. Possibly too fruitful. Alex coaches

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Workshop (PAST): Practice Creativity and Produce Music with More Ease

Workshop was held on August 12th, 2025 at the Recreational Psychoacoustics Lab in Seattle, WA Description Let’s explore how you relate to your creative work, not just how you organize it and technically produce it. This workshop is both a facilitated conversation about creativity and an introduction to practical frameworks for making music with greater ease and authenticity. The emphasis will be on creating music authentically and effortlessly – understanding how to relate to your unique creativity rather than force it (to be like someone else’s practice). We’ll start by sharing our creative stories and current challenges, then dive into

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Making music on the go

One of the challenges of traveling as a music producer is finding a way to create music when you’re on the go and can’t bring an instrument or even your laptop. A couple of years ago, I bought Polyend’s Tracker Mini so I could get immersed in music-making while traveling, particularly on the plane or moments of downtime. A tracker is software or gear that allows you to compose music in a way that is kind of like a chronoligical spreadsheet. When I go on trips, I tend to challenge myself to finish a full track, using my Tracker Mini.

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Using a track from Gigi and Loopy Pro for frictionless jamming of a new idea

I was playing along to the track Tew Ante Sew from Gigi and was just inspired by the simple arrangement and orchestration that integrates Ethiopian music and electronic production. I was listening to the track because of this article from Hearing Things about what tracks inspire the artist Lyra Pramuk. Then I just wanted to pick up my Epiphone Dot Studio guitar. I realized I should be recording–something I want to do more often when I find myself picking up an instrument and noodling. So I quickly got my iPad and iRig Pro out of my bag. (The gears was

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My first attempt at live looping

Here’s a video I put together of my first attempt at live looping. I’m curious to learn live looping both as a way of creating ideas and as a way of performing live (in person or online). It was really fun. But the process is also intimidating for me because of being “put on the spot” to improvise and the manage the array of gear. Obviously both things will get easier with practice, which I’m looking forward to doing! Obviously I’ll post those videos as I make them. Hopefully soon I’ll figure out a way of performing live looping, um,

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Developing a forgotten idea into a possible track

Recently, I have been going through mandolin (and octave mandolin) recordings I made while living in Halifax between July 2023 and July 2024. At this point, I’ve forgotten all of the ideas in those recordings–no idea if there’s some gold in there or just coal. These recordings happened in two ways. The first was quick, ad hoc recordings I did when I had an extra moment, and I picked up one of my instruments. The idea being that if I’m going to noodle on the mandolin, I might as well record it because it might wind up being a useful

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Lovin’ Loopy Pro

Discovering Loopy Pro has been a game-changer for my workflow, at least for brainstorming musical ideas. I’ve wanted to learn looping, which is when you record short clips of audio over other short clips of audio you just previously recorded. But I have had so much else to learn and still do. I love how Loopy Pro encourages getting into a flow state, boosting my creativity (or at least capturing my creativity). But I also aspire to do live looping—performing with loops in front of an audience, which is an art form all its own (and so even more to

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Working on the next album!

The main thing I’ve been working on lately–probably more than I should be–is creating new music for another album. (Or maybe I’ll just release singles, I haven’t decided yet.) I’m eager to keep developing my sound as a musician, composer, producer, and audio engineer. I’m honestly already shocked by how different-sounding my current ideas are from the sound of my recent album Regretfulnot. My sound is now much more instrumental and strings-focused than electronic (at least, the initial ideas I’m getting down). My new/upcoming sound is somewhere in the folktronica/jamtronica/jazztronica realm, I guess. Part of that is how and why

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Creative resistance and finding the right path

Today, I’m feeling some resistance about moving on to the arranging stage of the composition process of my album. I think I am a bit overwhelmed by the number of ideas I created. The transition from Loopy Pro to Studio One has required more effort than I was hoping, which has taken me out of the flow (but probably giving me some good separation, too). And I’m starting to give the process more weight and meaning than I should. Jamming and developing ideas was easy to maintain detachment from the outcome. But now I’m thinking, “is this good enough to

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Listen to a 90-minute protest march in 5 minutes

I wanted to speed up the audio from the No Kings that I attended in Seattle protest, so you can hear it all in around five minutes. I did that using Davinci Resolve. Here is that audio, which has been compressed and EQ’d so there are no big changes in volume or super harsh noises. What stands out to you most? For me, it’s the overall waxing and waning of people’s voices and energy. Then I couldn’t resist seeing if I could turn that audio into a bit of a noise composition. So I did a speed run (for me,

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Gotta be creative? Get back to bass-ics.

When I started working on my second album, I thought I had a sound and a process fairly figured out. My first album, Regretfulnot, was the result of a year-long crash course in electronic music-making—MIDI controllers, virtual instruments, drum programming, sample selection, patch building, and layers of electronic effects processing. Though, crash course makes it seem more intentional and systematic than it was. More like a hodge podge of online courses, following YouTube tutorials, rabbit holes, and working for a short time with an unhelpful mentor and a long time (still!) with a helpful one. I am pretty proud of

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Having trouble managing a creative project?

How do you manage your artistic, musical, or other creative projects? Are you wanting a different way? I’ve tried a lot of different methods for project management in general. As far as music making, years and years ago, my approach was very unsophisticated and disorganized–scribblings across multiple journals (that would get lost and stolen), Word documents with difficult-to-decipher hints at chord progressions, and other random files that were unclear whether they contained a promising idea, bad idea, or something that was almost finished. The point is, I’m sure I lost a lot of ideas and could have written even more

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Got Loopy Pro running on Mac

As you know, I’m really digging Loopy Pro, an iOS app that is somewhere between a looper pedal, full-blown DAW, and rapid user-interface builder. Overall, I’ve enjoyed using an iPad to brainstorm musical ideas. It reduces friction and makes it so you can always have a tool for recording ideas wherever you are. The challenge with Loopy Pro on iOS is reorganizing a messy brainstorming session, whether that’s moving clips around or renaming clips (rather than the default Clip 1, Clip 2, Clip 3, etc.). And unlike some iOS apps, it’s not possible to install Loopy Pro on a Mac

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This celtic-y idea gives me a huge buzz

Actually, the random name generator in the Polyend Play+, which is playing drums in this clip, gave me the name Huge Buzz. That’s I named this little idea on my sweet-playing Eastman Warren Ellis tenor guitar (which is tuned in fifths the same as an octave mandolin or tenor banjo). If it sounds rather celtic-y, yeah, it’s one of the genre influences that seems to just come out of me. These days, I probably can only play two actual celtic tunes (though I once could play several others). But I’ve listened to a lot of Irish, Scottish, and Cape Breton

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Building my recording engineering chops

Over the past six weeks, I had a blast learning from audio engineers Mike and Sam at Hall of Justice Recording Studio in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. For the final session, a classmate and I got to do the full setup and recording of a band. It turned out pretty well based on this quick mix, which you can hear below. Best of all, I actually feel ready to engineer my own studio session now.

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Live Looping: The Fight is the Trap

I’m pretty sure I’ll be making a habit of posting my live looping experiments as I hopefully get good enough to do them live in front of folks (online or in person). At the very least, I hope this approach to creating is a fruitful way of generating ideas and engaging folks in the creation process. It’s a challenge for me to keep track of everything for sure. It’s also a challenge for me to develop ideas on the spot quickly. It certainly results in lots of flubs–fingers getting out of position, forgetting what key/mode I was playing in etc.

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Stand out. Someone has to.

This live loop, well, isn’t live because I forgot to press record. So I recorded a live mix, which is apparently almost as challenging for my brain to keep track of as when I’m playing an instrument at the same time. This idea was based on a sample from John Lithgow’s reading of Timothy Snyder’s twenty lessons on fighting tyranny. Those lessons are from Snyder’s 2017 book; each chapter expands on the twenty lessons. I read the book back in 2021. Studying nationalism, fascism, and terrorism (particularly US-based domestic) has been a thing for me for many years, both because

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Stopping the hostile takeover

Are you a United States federal employee? Were you one? Were you recently terminated? This looping session is for you. What Trump and Musk are doing to so many federal employees and the service they provide is not just concerning; it’s cruel. I composed this session around samples I took from a talk by Everett Kelley during the recent Federal Unionist Network “Save Our Service” mass call. It was an inspiring call. Kelley’s words are incredibly motivating. His words apply generally too: We can resist the takeover of the country and government by billionaires and oligarchs if we organize and

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