Man, I’m the polar opposite. To each their own. :) I spend the bulk of my time coding, reviewing patches, responding bug reports and attending rote meetings, when I’d much rather be doing something creative with my time. I’m not that interesting in being in a band these days, mainly because I like to do my own thing too much and so does everyone else I know that plays music, haha. That’s forgetting the fact that there’s never been much money in it for me, so the idea of turning it into a career has never seemed tangible.

And it’s not that I dislike tech or computers (I’m on Linux, I genuinely like developing software when it’s something I care about, and I have a home server setup that I use just about every day.), it’s just that I get a lot more satisfaction out of playing music or making art. Technology to me is a means to an end; if I couldn’t put songs together, make paintings or animations, program indie games, play games, build a media library, etc., I don’t think I’d really care about computers at all.

Basically when it comes to tech stuff, I don’t care for the process as much as I care about the results. With creative endeavors it’s the opposite, I really love the process and I’d rather spend my time doing that than just about anything else.

(Now if only I could commit to finishing some more of my musical ideas… lol)

You never even listen to a song and want to play along with it? Or do you not even listen to much music anymore?

I’ve never had much commercial success with music, and it’s probably more brutal now than it’s ever been, but I still love writing, recording, and jamming out with my favorite songs, so it’s hard to relate. I’ve known people who gave up on the dream of “making it”, but I’ve never known someone to stop playing music altogether.

Well, when it comes to MPE devices (Seaboard, Linnstrument, Osmose, etc.) the MIDI spec is being… stretched.

Electronic music is a different artform, but it’s still fun and satisfying for the people who make it. Plus, I’d argue that most people who make electronic music do it because they like that type of music, not because they don’t want to learn the violin or whatever.

I don’t have a Seaboard, but FWIW it shows up as a valid controller in the menu for Bitwig Studio under Linux, so it might not be hard to set up at all. Bitwig also has great MPE support, and if my Linnstrument is anything to go off of, you’ll have a ton of run with MPE on the Seaboard. :)

Or the $600 guitar, $600 baritone guitar and $600 fretless bass I just bought. 🥴

This is the kind of thing you say when you never learned how to play Blitzkreig Bop.

Try out a mesh network VPN like tailscale (others are available, but i haven’t tried them).

Tailscale is basically just a simple but powerful wireguard manager that does all of the work of setting up a mesh network for you, and it works amazingly well in my experience. The free account is good for I think 3 users and 100 devices on a network and has been the perfect thing to expose my home server to my various devices no matter where I am.

I like it so much after having used it for the last few months that I just spent way too much money upgrading my server… but that’s another thing entirely. lol