“Speculation and Imagination”

New music! 🎛️ 🎵

Check out my latest release “Speculation and Imagination”, combining gentle melodic sequences with harsh, noisy feedback.

These tracks are an edit of my live analog synthesizer improvisation from a online “session” with painter Onozaki Takuya. Onozaki and I meet monthly for jam sessions over Zoom, him in Hanamaki and me in Connecticut, where he paints, and I play my synths, exchanging artistic ideas across our mediums.

If you happen to be around Toyko this week, Onozaki’s works, some of which were created in these sessions, are on display 2/7/25-2/16/25 at “Gallery Camellia”in Ginza.

No-Input DAW (Logic Pro X Feedback Loops & Sound Design)

Tutorial on “no-input mixing” in a DAW (Logic Pro X, in this case) for wild feedback-based sound design.


With a little knowledge of digital signal flow, we can easily set up an aux track in our DAW as a feedback loop–sending the track back into itself. Once we start adding effects, we can achieve new and unexpected sounds. This technique could be a way to generate some new sonic material, add some interest to a drum loop, or even generate vast, evolving soundscapes.

0:00 Intro / Casio Beat
0:39 Output to Aux Track
1:06 Feeding Back with a Bus Send
2:20 Adding Effects to the Loop
4:14 More Subtle Effects
4:58 More Extreme (Pitch Shifter)
5:17 Removing the “Input”
6:47 Talking through the No-Input Mixer
8:18 Closing Thoughts

More Logic Pro X tutorials:

Pd Patch from Scratch: Ring Modulation and Filterbank

A quick and easy Pure Data patch-from-scratch tutorial building another feedback loop with a delay and a ring modulator, this time with a fixed filter bank.

Inspired by the music of Jaap Vink, with three sine waves, a filterbank, a delay, and some feedback, we can make some slow evolving-complex and dynamic sounds.

In this patch we take a sine wave, ring modulate it, then ring modulate that result before running into a filterbank, delay, and then feeding it back on itself.

There’s no talking on this one, just building the patch, and listening to it go.

More feedback loops (in analog):

Feedback Loops with Cheap Stuff

Create dynamic feedback loops on a cheap mixer and pedals. With just a few pieces of equipment you can make wonderful, interactive, and unpredictable sound systems.

Over the summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about feedback and how simple devices can create complex sounds when fed back into themselves. Alongside checking out a lot of great music, I’ve been reading about 1950s “Cybernetics” and 1990s Japanese “Noise Music”, and considering the expressive possibilities of resonance and feedback. In this video I show a simple way to put together a noisy feedback loop setup with inexpensive equipment I had sitting in my drawer.

Further Study:

Sarah Belle Read’s Tutorial on No-Input Mixing


La Synthèse Humaine, Feedback Loops Explained and Demonstrated on Serge Synthesizers

Norbert Wiener, “The Human Use of Human Beings” (1950)


David Novak, “Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation” (2013)