Making music has been part of my life since the late 1990s. It all started with keyboard lessons and quickly transitioned into creating electronic sounds with Magix Music Maker V2000, then Reason, later a Maschine from Native Instruments and Ableton Live with a Push 2. Along the way an SP-404 and a Teenage Engineering PO-33 K.O! found their place on my desk.
Under the name Tüdel Beats I made instrumental hip hop and lo-fi electronic music. What I loved most was making it physically, with my hands on a hardware controller instead of a mouse. That has stuck: wherever I can, I try to move away from the screen.
After attending a tape loop workshop I got hooked. Short loops of tape, slowly drifting and wearing out, turned out to be my favourite way to make ambient music: imperfect, slow and very soothing.
Soon after, I found a cheap, broken Fostex 160 Multitracker on eBay and got it working again. It still amazes me that 40-year-old technology keeps running if you treat it right. Since then I’ve experimented with tape and tape loops of all kinds, from 3D-printed inserts to whole printed cassettes.
The other half has always been electronics: embedded systems, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, the ESP8266 and later the ESP32. Building my own instruments instead of only buying them was the obvious next step.
I’ve worked as a frontend software engineer for over a decade, and I still love to code. Music and electronics were always what happened after hours. Now I want to bring it all together and see where it leads: making music, and building the hardware and software for it.
Until now, I’ve mostly done all of this on my own and kept it to myself. This blog is where I want to change that: a workshop diary, out in the open. Read along, listen to my music, and if you’re into tape, ambient music or soldering, get in touch on Mastodon or by . I’d love to hear from you, learn from you and learn together.