Ben McAllister - Latest Posts

Happy birthday Dalila!

A little field recording.

We saw the Lemon Twigs last night, which ruled.

Getting back into my practice routine, there's much noodling happening.

Cmon Cmon is getting back together in July - we had our first "what are we going to do" conversation on today, so I've been listening through the archives for sessions we might add to to finish our lost 2nd record.

I'm back after a long break and layoff.

I'm back after a long break and layoff.

From January 7, 2026: The return of Car Ride Adventure from post 28.

From March 12, 2024: Found this discarded sketch on the op-1.

From May 3, 2025: A little piece from a recording of yesterday's string changing.

From November 2, 2025: Good times this weekend working some kinks out of Thuja by resuscitating some old beat juggling code.

From March 15, 2025:

From February 16, 2025: Getting ready for more duo rehearsals with the drummer Neil Wilson and reconvening with Guitar Cult for recording.

From March 14, 2025:

From March 10, 2024: About 10 years ago I was working in an old industrial building in Ballard, listening to the sound of hammers on floorboards in the office space above mine.

From October 6, 2025: A tiny change, but finally a working live coding example for Thuja.

From July 12, 2025: Clip from something I titled "Moment", a Circular 4 track recording from 7/2023.

From January 28, 2024: The Pocket Operators can do so much - the Speak is my favorite.

From October 12, 2025: I was surprised when I heard how decent the sampled guitars sounded in this clip.

From March 1, 2024: VCS3 vs Ebows on VERY cranked guitar, stroking the strings and leaving a harmonic behind, to be magnified by an ebow.

From July 6, 2024: The ol minor 6 -> 5 in the melody.

From October 16, 2025: Thuja realtime practice - shaping these textures that come from randomly indexing into longer recordings of ebow'd guitars.

From August 25, 2024: From April 4: I forgot I'd made this drum track to practice this study with.

From August 18, 2024: From March 8: This pattern was written on night 2 with no sleep 11 years ago almost to the day, about 3am (my orig recording is Memo 2013.03.01-EndlessLoopTuktu.mp3).

From August 29, 2024: From May 29 One little addition to yesterday's notebook page.

From August 22, 2024: From March 18 For the last 5 years I've been obsessed with writing pieces for my group Guitar Cult - lots of pieces for either 3, 4 of 6.

From November 17, 2024: I watched a video on youtube where the comment is made that the EP-133 is a modern SK1 - easy, immediate and flexible.

From July 9, 2024: Rabbit holed a bit into the Dave Brubeck archive tonight (THANK YOU DANETTE!).

From August 21, 2024: From March 26: Lotta motion in this one.

From March 19, 2024: This filtering comes from using the PVOC utility and opcode in Csound.

From May 21, 2024: I've been away from the Circular 4Track and thinking about what I want to change about it.

From October 27, 2024: Tonight a got a little obsessed with this exercise.

From August 20, 2024: from March 6: A little audio verité from Jason's place, layering guitars and more guitars.

From December 6, 2025: As I do each year, I'm gathering composition seeds from old notebooks for my usual wintertime focus.

From August 24, 2024: From April 2 Big insomnia night last night as I ran inventory - aka monkey-minded - about all the things I think I must do.

From May 25, 2025: ESQ-1 + EP-133 - the EP-133 sequencer RULEZ.

From May 29, 2024: Number 150!

From July 24, 2024: The old Articulations podcast theme.

From August 17, 2024: From Feb 18: Brainstorming parts to a tune Jason set up with the working title of loss, my hands we not warming up, so I rabbit-holed on this.

From January 2, 2024: 4 days on the couch sick after 10 days without guitar practice.

From August 31, 2024: Metallica hit town just as we were heading off for 2 weeks in Croatia - Rob and Brian at work went, which sparked a whole conversation on what is good/bad metal from their blossoming and what constituted 'good' Metallica.

From February 25, 2024: Another bit from Circadia.

From January 1, 2024: Learning how to use my new Teenage Engineering OP-1, playing with this line:

From October 18, 2024: Sam's birthday today - tonight we celebrate after being holed up with Covid for two weeks.

From August 27, 2024: From April 8 A complicated warmup turned into something simpler.