Happy holiday season! The last year had a lot of goings on and I feel a 2025 retrospective is in order. There were lots of successes, many, many hurdles, a ton of hard work, many life-affirming moments, and friends and family who both made and continue to make this journey possible.
Part of the point of this blog is to document this year. Like I said, there was a lot and I want to be able to look back and see all the things I accomplished in what I feel like was a cathartic year. Another is to express gratitude.
To my:
- Self for pushing through the hurdles, making consistent progress, and staying with it to the point where I’m just starting to see some traction from all of the work.
- Family for sticking with me through the planning, designing, building, integrating, and implementing of the various parts of the systems involved with both C Roberts Percussion and C Roberts Music Lessons.
- Friends for the same as above and also thinking of me when something I do could be useful to them or someone they know.
The support I felt deep in my bones is palpable and deeply appreciated. Thank you all for the love, kindness, support, and push to keep improving.
Let’s do this methodically and chronologically. That seems to be the best and easiest way to get all of this out of my head. But before I start, I’d like to give a bit of context.
2024 was a transformative year. But I made a major mistake. I was asked to join a very large tour and I initially said yes. But then doubt crept back in. I didn’t see how I was going to make it from the end of one tour to the beginning of the next. My family “needed” me seek stability in the form of going back into tech or IT. Most of the second half of 2024 was spent doubting myself and studying for a networking certification. I made it, basically, through the entire course and was very well prepared to take the exam. However, when December rolled around, I realized that I made it in spite of my fears and doubts. It was by the skin of my teeth, but I made it. In other words, I wasted hours and days worth of brain cycles on doubt. I should have just trusted the process and myself and stuck to the decision I made in 2023. But I didn’t give up on tech just yet. After learning a reasonable amount of more than a dozen different tools and systems, and feeling like I was learning something for a job interview that wouldn’t come. It should be noted that I was seeing on social media just how bad the job market was for tech and IT. There was something on the order of 100,000 tech employees laid off from every level of skill and ability. I wasn’t entry level, but compared to someone working at a FANG org, even half my age, I had little chance. So, I made the decision to take my future into my own hands.
2025 saw the studio I was teaching out of struggle. We tried things, we floated ideas, we tried things but none saw any motion. I’m not saying this is anyone’s fault and I don’t mean to deride anything those wonderful, talented people were trying to accomplish, but it was just a slog without an appreciable upside for anyone involved. However, I was speaking with fellow teachers and seeing things that worked for them and telling them things that worked for me. It was a beautiful exchange of ideas and that is one part that I am extremely appreciative of.
One of the ideas we talked about was digital presence. Do we have a good, functional website that provides all necessary and relevant information? Is it easy to maintain? Is it user-friendly for both the teacher and the student? How can it be leveraged to reduce load and generate new students? Can it be built and run on a shoe string? All extremely valuable questions.
In March, I volunteered with DevOps Days as part of the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE). I helped set up calendars and the social media post cadence and how to leverage LLMs to generate awareness posts for LinkedIn. It was transformative and though I don’t want to call anyone out by name, I do want to thank the organizers at DevOps Days for all the knowledge and inspiration they freely gave for what felt like next to nothing in return. They are a wonderful, welcoming team and they provided me a way to give back even an iota of what has been given to me. Thank you all.
With that new information, my previous knowledge and skill, and a fresh ChatGPT account, I started learning about LLMs, prompt engineering, and how to leverage the technology to educate and empower me to build the rest of the year.
As a pet project I built a cloud file server and made it web accessible based on an Ubuntu VM. All from scratch with some coding help from various GPTs I trained for that specific purpose. I now use it as an alternative to Google Drive and Dropbox (though I still use both extensively). For example, I keep music files there so I can reference them from my phone or tablet. It was a difficult project where I needed to refresh my sysadmin and ops skills and learn some PHP along the way. I also studied a little bit for the CISSP but that got heavy really quick and with no real world application outside of my personal projects, was deprioritized.
Then I moved on to architecting, designing, planning, and building my teaching business from the ground up. But this time I didn’t want to do it ad hoc, it needed to be built with strength and resilience from the ground up. I set up a hosting service, purchased a WordPress license, and began building out the pages. I started with all the legal gobbledygook. The next step was figuring out the financials and economics of the business. Next was creating pages about offerings and prices. Then I pulled together teaching philosophy and about me pages. The site was coming together in a cohesive way that I would be proud to advertise to the public. When I was working on SEO I shopped the page around to some knowledgeable friends and the replies were strong and contained plenty of helpful, actionable suggestions. Yet another thing I am extremely grateful for, but the gratitude doesn’t stop there.
The idea was to offer music lesson services to children and adults in the Westlake Village area, where the studio was located. It also left open the possibility of remote lessons in the future. It looked good and seemed like it would convert fairly well. But the area was having trouble supporting more music education services because there were several extremely well established schools and facilities and a large number of extremely good private practice teachers. The market was fairly saturated.
The biggest and most worry hurdle was hooking the website into some kind of advertising platform and the ads themselves. It seemed daunting and impenetrable. But I took one baby step at a time and chiseled away at the problem – starting by hooking the website into Google Tag Manager. This was a technical rat’s nest. It isn’t really a hard thing to do, but what is hard is keeping everything straight and properly hooked to everything else. One tag for this, another for that. What’s the point of this of this tag? I know I made it for a reason! Documentation was absolutely clutch in keeping my head around it. I had to start over a couple of times. Each with a better idea of what was necessary, what wasn’t, and the documentation to keep it all understandable and graspable.
One aspect GTM brought to light was that I needed some kind of automated way for potential students or parents of students to be able to sign up for trial lessons. I researched many studio management solutions and landed on My Music Staff. It is competitively priced, they were willing to help me integrate it into my website and web-footprint, and its features, though not absolutely ideal, offered solutions to basically all of my major studio management issues, including web-forms that students and parents could use to sign-up for trial lessons which eventually hooked into GTM, GA4, and Google Ads after a bit of waiting on their dev team and some javascript massaging.
Eventually, I got it to the point where I felt ready to start hooking it into Google Analytics. This was a rat’s nest placed on top of the first rat’s nets. Do the IDs match? Oh wait… I need a Google Business account… do the IDs all align? Am I seeing the test data I’m pushing through correctly? I felt a great sense of pride and relief when everything started working together as intended.
Next, I started to hook it all into Google Ads. Again, making sure all the accounts were aligned and properly integrated together, researching and creating audiences, deciding on geographic regions, and starting to put together a rough idea of what I wanted a campaign to look like and my overall strategy with regards to advertising. My goal was to have everything integrated and working by the middle to end of July or beginning of August. It was important that ads start running before school starts so parents had a chance to find music lessons before the hustle and chaos of the new school year.
I didn’t quite make it. Partially because I was building the playing side simultaneously. Sessions at 4th Street Recording with the indomitable Sejo Navajas. Touring Edinburgh and Leipzig with the Sweet Kill, ending up at Wave-Gotik-Treffen where we received a ton of fantastic feedback, saw some great bands, including Kite, saw a bunch of castles, and had a blast of a time. Playing with several groups around the California area including Jesse Vaz and the Velvet Reign, Insect Surfers, the Sweet Kill, Draculina, the M-Squad, Waves of Steele, Jet Pack, The Band With No Name, and the Cabbys. We played international and local festivals, private and non-private parties, and a bunch of bar gigs. It was easily over 100 sets. Not the most I’ve done, but not too shabby. This really is the crux of balancing the different aspects of my career; having a creative outlet that allows me to make music with other humans on the spot. Creating an auditory zen painting with every song in every performance. Perfection isn’t possible, but practice and attention to detail will get you closer to whatever that is.
I did get ads rolling by the end of August. Yet another major breath of relief and accomplishment. I didn’t meet my deadline but I did get across the finish-line and that’s what’s important.
Starting in around April, and thinking I needed a studio for rehearsals, remote sessions, and remote lessons, I decided to start designing and building my home studio: Terraclast Sound Labs. Before I do that, this needs a bit of context as well.
In 2024, I had already decided to convert my garage into the above mentioned home studio. I got some preliminary things together and got something going I could limp along with. The fact is that I’ve been accumulating musical gear of different sorts for my entire 25+ year career as a musician. I don’t go into the details, but suffice to say I was limping a long with a minimum viable studio for rehearsing, and making demos. The summer was a really hot one in the valley. It got to around 120*F. I had a first rehearsal with Waves of Steele and it got even hotter in the studio. The space was minimally insulated and though the guitarist brought an excellent solid state amp, the bassist brought his 100W Bassman half-stack. Needless to say, we all got a bit of heat exhaustion and the Mac Mini I was using for my recording rig fried.
That was a major destroyer on multiple levels: the comp was ruined (though luckily, none of the other electronic gear) and that made me extremely fearful and hesitant to keep building out the rest of the studio. This lasted around 9 months. It wasn’t until I heard my teaching studio was either closing or relocating to Thousand Oaks that I decided to get serious about the studio build.
Studio design was the next logical step: heat mitigation in the summer, sound insulation for the neighbors and for room sound quality, the necessary tech needed to provide (primarily) remote lessons and (secondarily) remote sessions, how to organize all my business equipment, what to do with the stuff the garage was being used to store, power needs, lighting needs, networking needs, furniture needs, all of it.
I won’t go into too much detail about the build in this 2025 retrospective, but I will try to highlight the major points. I researched and applied a radiant barrier paint to the under sheathing of the roof to reflect both UV and IR light. Jesse Vaz very kindly accepted my request to have him spray the paint on instead of me needing to roll or brush it on. His help easily saved me a week of hard labor. He’s an MVP and I would strongly recommend hitting him up if you need something difficult painted. R15 rockwool was placed under that and attached with shade cloth for breathability and to allow sound to hit and be dampened by the rockwool. A small AC system intended to keep the hottest days bearable, at least for the equipment was the next layer. This was compounded with a temperature monitoring system so I could have data on how effective these systems are. Policy was put into place for when the weather was too hot to work in and what to do with any equipment on those days. Although 2025 was significantly cooler that 2024, the system seemed to be doing its job keeping the studio at or below 90*F on any given day and the monitoring system was showing me what the cooling system was actually accomplishing in terms of heat deltas at several different locations in and out of the building. When that started working as intended, that was another MAJOR sigh of relief and accomplishment.
It was around this time that I was forced to take on a significant side quest. There was a lot of renovation, tear-downs, and tenting happening in my neighborhood. Because of a really terrible stucco job a contractor did in 2024, there was an army of rats that invaded my home. There is nothing good I can say about any of this. It was a literal battle royale. I, personally, exterminated a dozen rats (not particularly proud of this but it was absolutely necessary), had to call Terminex to begin sealing up all possible ways for the varments to enter both the house, the crawlspace, and the roof. They exterminated about another handful with their traps, but they were still getting into the house, leaving excrement, stink, and a trail of eaten food and damaged network cabling. After sealing up the majority of their entrances, there were only two left and one was inside the outdoor water heater closet that was overdue for replacement. I researched what could be done both in terms of either replacing or removing the closet and in terms of future-proofing our water heater situation. The final decision was made when a rat killed the water heater. I’m not sure how, but it did. So, I decided to get a tankless, remove the closet all together, and make sure every possible entrance was completely sealed with hardware cloth. One of their entrances, I thought it was decently sealed with a thinner wire mesh, steel wool, and pest-stop expanding foam. But much to my frustration, they ate a hole right through all of it and they were back under the house… So, I put new hardware cloth on the vent and screwed down that thing so tight, nothing was getting through it. Eventually, it worked and after a 6-7 month war with these invaders, I had broken the siege. It was an unmitigated nightmare and I’m glad we’re past it.
Then I could start working out the “inside systems” like power and signal routing, what I could do with the space in terms of the constraints from the room and my finances, and actually start to integrate things into a recording, rehearsing, content creation, and remote teaching system: hardware and software sub-systems that enable me to do the work I need to do.
Relatively speaking, audio was the easy part. Video and integrating the audio was a beast.
After fairly extensive testing, I realized that webcams absolutely will not work for a multi-camera streaming (lessons) and content capture rig. I needed to have everything fed via HDMI to capture cards. That meant further investment in cameras and the cabling and cards required in addition to re-routing the cabling to avoid power runs at all costs.
Basically, I had to completely tear down the studio’s tech infrastructure, replan it, and re-implement it. Surprisingly and fortunately, this was much easier and faster than expected and by the second week of December, the studio was back up and running and actually running as hoped.
I’ve also created several blog posts and short-form video content. Some of it as a public-facing experiment, some to take advantage of social media’s potential reach, some as a vehicle for coming up with self-entertaining exercises and study-pieces. Content creation isn’t really something I particularly enjoy, in and of itself. I’m a sideman. I love being on stage, but I really don’t need to be in the spotlight. But creating content keeps my face, name, and abilities going around so it helps me get more work. Unfortunately, that is the state of our world these days, as far as I can tell. But it’s alright; adapt and overcome, right?
But why build the studio? Having this studio is foundational. I need a long-term, low-cost way to perform all the aspects of my business and it provides me a headquarters where I can center myself, work on stuff, build things, experiment, create, store my equipment, and have a space I can pretty much call my own.
But let me back up a bit. In addition to all this work stuff, I was also trying to be as hands-on with my kids as possible. School events, afterschool activities, and something I had been waiting to participate in with bated breath basically my entire adult life, getting to participate in Scouting again.
I am an Eagle Scout and it is a major aspect of my being that informs literally every other facet of my life. It helped me develop character, leadership, civic participation, physical fitness, life skills, a love for the outdoors, and working together to accomplish difficult things. I was looking forward to having a family and showing them how excellent and helpful scouting could be.
My son, Finn, joined Pack 311 here in Valley Village and I wanted to be as involved as my bandwidth would allow. At the first Pack meeting, I talked with some leaders and specifically made a point to speak with the Cub Master stating that I am beyond excited about scouting and although I’m really busy, I really want to be a very active member with the constraints that my career requires.
They said it’s fine, anything I was willing to help with was greatly appreciated, basically welcoming me with open, warm arms. I’ve done all the training available for adult volunteers in Cub Scouts. I’ve read a book on the not so savoury aspects of Scouting’s history and paid attention to the moves being made to ensure these terrible things never happen again. I’m happy with the current state of things, even though no human system will ever be perfect, and I’m honored to be able to offer my skills and abilities to the Pack and District, as my schedule and bandwidth allow. I’m also extremely excited to see what skills, friendships, and adventures both Finn and my daughter, Mae, will experience through scouting and I have every intention of being there for as many of those steps along the way.
All in all, 2025 was a monumental year for me. An inflection point, if you will. I’m starting to see the beginnings of traction with ad conversions and my social media strategy. I’ve set myself up for success in 2026 as I now have a solid infrastructure foundation to really pursue many business ideas I’ve had floating around in my brain for a long time, I’m reconnecting with friends and family I’ve fallen out of touch with, I’m making new friends and meeting new colleagues, I’m feeling more confident in my decisions with every passing day, and, best of all, I’m getting to do it, more or less, on my terms.
In spite of the hurdles, challenges, difficulties, and setbacks, I’m extremely proud of everything I’ve accomplished this year. I’m also happy that I, like all of us, am a multifaceted person. I am a musician, an educator, a technologist, a tinkerer, and a father. There is part of me that still thinks these different facets make me a very unusual person. And maybe it’s true. However, they all work together to both make and enable me to accomplish the things I set out to accomplish. If you reframe things correctly, your weirdness is easily your greatest strength. I think my main lesson from this year is never stop being your weird self. Just make sure everything aligns and find a way for it all to work together.
I’m extremely grateful for everyone I’ve conversed with, shared a hug with, worked with or for, and the connections I’ve built over the year. And if you made it this far into this 2025 retrospective, you deserve a major thank you! Without the support of my family, friends, mentors, colleagues, and people giving me their time and energy, this year wouldn’t have been possible. I cannot express how important you and our relationships are to me. Thank you, I love you, and I hope we can share a hug in 2026.
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