It’s hard to believe it’s been more than a decade since I used to regularly write an articles here on my site. While it was largely a rewarding experience, the fact that the blog was largely dedicated to music production at times made it feel more like a job than the more all-encompassing personal creative outlet I had originally envisioned. It made sense at the time, I was a professional mastering engineer looking to grow my business, and a musician looking to promote my music and get gigs. Like many others in my situation, I over time transitioned to social media for these activities and the idea of writing only for those people who managed to find my website seemed less and less like a good use of time.

Since then I’ve come to rely on social media less and less, to the point now where I don’t even have a single social media account. The downside of the “likes” mentality became pretty clear to me early on and quite frankly I despise companies whose only motivation was to keep you hooked on the site in order to sell you ads. While it’s easy to logically look at the negatives and step away from such outlets, it also left me without an outlet to release my artistic endeavors without all the negative trappings that go along with social media. So for the last few months I’ve been mulling over the idea of starting up my blog again, just as a fun way to get my creative endeavors out there while giving myself a way to share what went into them at the same.

So…. here we are again. 14 years after my last post on tarekith.com, I’m starting up the blog again to solve that issue.

A lot has happened since those days, and I’m sure I’ll slowly unravel all that for those interested over the coming months. However one of the main things that’s changed for me, is that I have become heavily involved in photography and not just music as a creative endeavor. So there will be a mix of music and photos that get posted here, as well as some general discussion on all my usual outdoor activities that inspire me to create my art. Biking, hiking, backpacking, snowboarding, camping, etc are all things that keep me sane while driving my creative pursuits as well.

Let’s see where all this goes, and I hope you enjoy the ride along with me.