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Tools & Process

The Practice of Digital Craft

"The tool directs the mind, as the mind directs the tool."
—Richard Sennett

Every tool is a teacher. Some teach speed, others teach patience. Some fragment attention, others gather it. After years of chasing the newest and shiniest, I've learned to ask different questions: Does this tool make me more present? Does it invite return? Can it age into companionship?

"The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart."
—Fritz Lang, Metropolis

This page maps a practice—not a system. It's one violist's attempt to bring the ethics of musical craft into digital space. Take what resonates, leave what doesn't. The best workflow is the one you actually use.

Two Lives: Home and Tour

When Home Allows

The morning begins with paper and pencil. Not "morning pages"—that feels too prescribed, too self-conscious. Just writing. Whatever wants to emerge in the silence before screens wake. Dreams, observations, fragments of yesterday's rehearsal. The hand moving across paper slows time.

The tools matter here. Paper first: Leuchtturm A6 notebooks for daily carry—European paper that takes fountain pen without bleeding. For longer-form thinking, Midori MD A5 notebooks—Japanese paper so smooth it changes how you write. When I need real space to think—mapping connections, working out large-scale patterns—a Postalco A4 Snap Pad opens the territory. Currently testing the iA Notebook, curious if their digital minimalism translates to analog.

This isn't fetishism. As Roland Allen shows in The Notebook, these objects carry civilizations. Lucien X. Polastron's Une Brève Histoire de tous les livres taught me that paper itself has memory—European sheets thick with sizing, Japanese papers breathing like skin. The tool shapes the thought.

Pens follow the same logic. At home: Lamy 2000 fountain pens (M nib and cursive italic) or vintage Parker 51s from the 1940s—nothing matches their ink flow, but they're too precious for tour bags. On the road: the Lamy rollerball, reliable and uncomplaining. Inks mostly Pilot Iroshizuku—Japanese inks that shade like watercolors—plus carbon blacks for permanence.

For marginalia: Tombow Mono 2B, Camel HB, or Blackwing matte (RIP the original Blackwings), depending on the paper's tooth. For index cards: Faber-Castell propelling pencil or Kaweco mechanical. The precision matters when space is constrained.

For marking scores: Mitsubishi Hi-Uni in 4B or 6B—soft enough to mark without tearing, dark enough to see on the stand. Koh-i-Noor bicolor pencils (red/blue) for critical markings—fingerings in blue, bowings in red, or however the day's system emerges.

And always, the Hinodewashi Matomaru-kun eraser. "Matomaru" means "gathers"—the shavings collect into neat clumps instead of scattering. After years of eraser detritus on music stands, finding this was revelation. Clean desk, clean mind.

Only after coffee do the digital tools wake. The ritual matters: Hario V60, ceramic for its thermal mass. 22g coffee to 360g water. The bloom at 0:45, first pour to 1:10, pause for drawdown, final spiral to 1:55. Total time just under three minutes—long enough to transition from sleep to attention, short enough to maintain morning momentum. The Fellow Opus grinder at 6.25. Japanese filter paper. Water at 94–96°C.

Lynch drinks 20 cups a day and claims it's where ideas swim. I keep it to three—but understand the principle. Coffee creates a kind of focused alertness where patterns emerge. This isn't about perfection but consistency. On tour it's hotel coffee, terrible but sufficient. At home, this ritual creates a threshold. The precision isn't fussiness—it's the same attention that goes into bow speed or finger weight. Craft is craft.

Water follows—2 liters daily, preferably cool. Not cold (contracts the throat), not warm (too soothing), but cool like morning air. Hydration as maintenance, not performance. The body is the first instrument.

Obsidian opens to yesterday's daily note. This is the workshop—where morning writing gets transcribed (selectively), where observations wait to become posts, where patterns slowly reveal themselves. No plugins except the essentials. No complex hierarchies. Just markdown files in folders, linked when connection emerges naturally.

iA Writer for drafting. When Obsidian is the workshop, Writer is the quiet room. No panels, no preview, no distractions. Just text and cursor. It enforces what monks knew: constraint liberates.

When the Music Calls

Tour life breaks everything. 4:30 AM lobby calls. Airports, trains, strange beds. The morning reflection persists—sometimes just five minutes with terrible hotel coffee—but the elaborate rituals dissolve.

This is when minimal tools matter:

Drafts on the phone captures what can't wait. A phrase overheard in soundcheck. The way light falls in a 12th-century chapel where we're performing. These fragments sync to the desktop whenever we land somewhere with wifi.

Working Copy for publishing fragments from anywhere. Nothing elaborate—full posts need the laptop—but sometimes an observation demands immediate release.

The practice adapts or dies. Some weeks, the only writing happens in departure lounges. That's enough.

The Ecology of Tools

For Thinking & Writing

For Making

For Learning

For Capturing

Why These Tools?

Plain Text Everywhere

Every tool speaks plain text. No proprietary formats. No lock-in. What I write today will open in fifty years. This isn't Luddism; it's long-term thinking.

One may ask why not Notion, Roam, or whatever's current. I've watched too many tools die, taking years of work with them. Plain text is the cockroach of digital formats—it survives everything.

Local First

Files live on my machine, backed up simply. The cloud is someone else's computer. I use it (GitHub, iCloud) but don't depend on it. If the internet vanished tomorrow, I could keep working.

Boring Technology

Most of my tools are old. BBEdit from 1992. Jekyll from 2008. Terminal commands unchanged since the 1970s. Boring technology is proven technology. It does what it promises without surprises.

The Harder Questions

What I Don't Use

Where I Struggle

Analytics remain unresolved. Building readership might require knowing who's reading, but the cost to simplicity feels high. Still thinking.

Email wants immediate response but deserves contemplation. I check twice daily, respond once. Still, it feels like a leak in the vessel.

Instagram exists—@quaerendoinvenietis—but I'm hopeless at it. Algorithms deciding what I see feels antithetical to chosen attention. It sits mostly dormant.

The Reality of Practice

There is no typical day. When home in Barcelona, mornings can unfold into long stretches of reading, writing, thinking. The ideal exists:

Morning writing → Obsidian review → Deep work in iA Writer → Afternoon teaching → Evening reflection

But more often: A day somewhere, a few days elsewhere, maybe a week if we're lucky. Rehearsing 9–6. Evenings for concerts. Early mornings for travel—or recovery when we stay more than one night. The tools compress into phone and notebook. Fragments accumulate until the next stretch home, when they're sorted, expanded, published, or discarded.

This isn't failure. It's reality. The practice that survives is the one that bends without breaking.

Principles from Experience

What fifteen years of touring while trying to maintain a writing practice has taught:

  1. Essential over elaborate. The minimal viable practice that travels.

  2. Rhythm over routine. Routines break. Rhythms bend and return.

  3. Capture over craft. On tour, just get it down. Craft comes later.

  4. Boring survives novelty. The tool you'll use in five years matters more than what's exciting today.

  5. Physical anchors digital. Paper and pencil ground everything else.

  6. Forgive the broken days. And weeks. And months. Return is what matters.

The practice isn't the tools. It's returning to the tools, however imperfectly, however interrupted.

For Fellow Travelers

Especially those balancing multiple lives:

Start with what travels. Build out from there.

One capture method. Everything else can vary.

Weekly reviews, not daily. More forgiving, more realistic.

Seasonal tools. Some for home, some for away.

Document sparingly. But document.

The Meta-Practice

This page demonstrates the stack: Written in iA Writer during a blessed week home. Edited in BBEdit. Formatted in Markdown. Version-controlled in Git. Published via Jekyll. Each tool doing one thing well.

The site will migrate from Jekyll eventually—when there's time, when it matters enough. Until then, it works. That's enough.

Want to Go Deeper?

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