Home
Making Things Real: Ideas, Demos, and the Joy of Creating
For those who know me, they know I love music.
Over the years, I collected a lot of song ideas, riffs, chord progressions, and fragments of melodies. Some lived in notebooks. Others survived as recordings on old phones, hard drives, and computers that no longer exist.
For one reason or another, they never made it beyond that.
In 2025, that finally changed.
Today I'm sharing a collection of demos built from ideas I've been carrying around for years.
You can listen to the demos here:
The most interesting part isn't the demos themselves.
It's why it took me so long to record them.
What's funny is that this isn't the first time I've written about wanting to record music.
Years ago, I wrote a blog post about music, creativity, and the desire to create something of my own. Looking back at it now, I realized the idea stayed with me much longer than I expected.
For years, recording music remained one of those projects I kept telling myself I'd get to eventually.
Life happened.
I built open source projects, started companies, worked with amazing teams, and helped build products used by thousands of people.
But music was always the thing I kept postponing.
Running Out of Excuses
Looking back, there wasn't a single moment that made me start recording music.
It was a series of small events and happy accidents.
Jorge Atempa shared a few songs on social media. Around the same time, I mentioned hime that I was thinking about buying an audio interface so I could finally start recording music.
One conversation led to another, and I offered to help him record and polish some of his ideas.
I had never recorded either my own music or someone else's before. That was part of the appeal. I wasn't trying to become a producer. I was excited to learn.
I ended up working on five or six of songs that he shared with me. As I recorded guitars, arranged parts, and experimented with ideas, something unexpected happened.
A question kept coming back to me:
If I'm helping someone else record their music, why am I not recording my own?
The irony wasn't lost on me. I had spent years collecting ideas, yet here I was helping someone else bring theirs to life.
That question became impossible to ignore.
Around the same time, another friend, Markie, sold me his bass. I had never owned one before, and I needed it to complete some of the recordings, so I bought it.
For years there was always another reason to wait: not enough time, not enough gear, not enough knowledge, not enough confidence.
Now I had all the pieces together.
The excuses were running out.
One by one, the barriers I had built over the years started to disappear.
Three of the demos I'm sharing today started as songs Jorge shared with me. Helping him move his ideas forward ended up helping me move mine forward as well.
Recording the Ideas
Some of these demos began as riffs that had been sitting around for years. In fact, a few of them are older than some of the software used to record them.
Others are much newer. Buying the bass didn't just help me complete recordings it inspired new songs as well. A few of the tracks in this collection were written after I bought it.
As my coworker and friend Flavio once told me, "Every instrument seems to have songs hidden inside it." After buying the bass, I started discovering a few of those songs myself.
Together, they represent a mix of old ideas finally finding a home and new ideas that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Once I started recording, I discovered something surprising: it was easier, more accessible, and far more fun than I expected.
The part I enjoyed most wasn't necessarily playing guitar, bass or synths. It was putting everything together, taking separate pieces and slowly turning them into something that resembled the songs I had been hearing in my head for years.
What's interesting is that they rarely ended up sounding exactly the way I imagined. The recording process became a conversation between the original idea and what the song wanted to become.
Some of my favorite moments happened when a song started moving in a completely different direction than I originally intended. Recording wasn't just documenting an idea; it was helping discover what that idea actually was.
What surprised me most wasn't that I finally recorded some songs. It was how much I enjoyed the process.
For years, recording music felt like the goal. Once I started, I realized the recording wasn't the reward. The reward was experimenting, learning, trying things that didn't work, discovering things that did, and watching an idea slowly take shape.
Some songs ended up sounding close to what I originally imagined. Others became something completely different.
Either way, I found myself looking forward to the next session, not because I was trying to finish a song, but because I was enjoying making it.
Maybe that's what had kept those ideas around for so many years. Not the hope of creating a finished album, but the simple desire to create something.
Sharing the Demos
The demos I'm sharing today are instrumental ony for now, but adding vocals is something I'm looking forward to exploring next.
I've been working on these on my own so far, but I'm definitely open to collaborating with other people along the way.
If you decide to listen, I'd love to know what you hear.
Which influences stand out?
I'm curious what you hear in these songs, and how that compares to what I hear when I listen back.
These demos represent something I've wanted to do for a very long time.
For years they existed as ideas, riffs, and half-finished recordings.
Now they're something I can share.
They're no longer ideas.
They're real.