Notes from
the bench.
Studio writing on web design, AI workflows, audio engineering, and the work in between. No filler. Short sentences. Real outcomes.
AI Isn't the Threat to Music. Sameness Is.
The stigma around AI in music production points the wrong way. A flood of competent, forgettable tracks is exactly what makes a real point of view rare.
Quantized Drums Are a Tell. Here's What Actually Fixes Them.
Programmed drums sound fake because they're perfect. Real drumming is velocity, timing drift, and fatigue. Feel is an engineering problem, not a preset.
No Server. No MCP. Just Files in a Folder.
Everyone's racing to ship an MCP server. Reaper Daemon gives an AI agent hands in your DAW with nothing but JSON files in a folder. Here's why simple won.
AI Isn't Taking Your Job. It's Rewriting the Job Description.
The loud headlines say AI is stealing jobs. The reality is more complicated, more interesting, and ultimately more useful.
Astro vs WordPress for service businesses
WordPress is the default for service-business sites. Astro is the question. The decision tree, the hidden costs, and a clean migration path off WordPress.
After-hours leads, what an HVAC website needs to capture them
It is 2am, a basement is flooding. Your website has 30 seconds to convert that homeowner into a phone call. What the site has to do, and what to rip out.
How to scrape local business leads in Python without an API
Apollo and ZoomInfo are B2B-only and expensive. For local services you scrape Bing and Yelp. The polite-crawler pattern, dedupe rules, and legal guardrails.
What a smash room website actually needs (and what to skip)
The nine sections every smash room, rage room, or paint splatter venue site needs to convert bookings, and the four things to leave on the cutting room floor.
How to wire Stripe Checkout into a chat conversation
A working pattern for turning an AI chat into a one-minute Stripe Checkout flow. The route handler, the four fields, and the anti-patterns that kill conversion.
The internet is haunted. We make it useful.
Why Dead Pixel Design exists, what we ship, and the kind of work we will not take.