What kind of animator are you?

Issue #96 | April 26th, 2026

Hey Reader 👋

Okay, so quick confession before we get into this week's issue.

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you probably have a pretty good sense of how insane my daily life is right now. Between the Freelancing for Animators community, client work, the baby, the house renovation, and everything else in between… there's genuinely no room for anything else.

And yet.

You probably guessed something's up. I found a little sliver of time for something that makes me feel so alive. And if you know me at all, you already know where this is going.

It's music. 🎹

Music is my first love. It will always be my first love.

Here's the problem. My calendar is packed. Like, packed packed. I could maybe allocate one or two hours a week to music… but here's the thing, and I've talked about this with Claude, with friends, with myself in the shower, music is an addiction for me. The more I do it, the more I want it. One hour becomes two. Two becomes four. And before I know it, it's eating into everything else.

So a sane person would say, okay, don't go there right now.

And yet here I am. Going there.

The studio is coming.

Soon, I'll have a little studio in the house. Everything built around my MacBook Pro. I make music almost entirely in the box, so that's really all I need.

I've been using Logic for years but never really efficiently. I've always been drawn to Pro Tools. I want the same feeling I have with After Effects or Maya, where the friction between idea and execution is basically zero. You have an idea, you launch the thing, you record, you're in.

So that's what I'm doing this week. Installing Pro Tools. Setting up plugins. Getting the whole thing so deeply learned that when I do sit down, I don't waste a single minute fighting the software.

It started with that Charlie Puth video I shared last week. That was the spark.

And here's the thing I realized this week.

I think I've been animating exactly the way I play music.

Let me explain. I'm not a super technical animator. I don't have a giant bag of tools. I don't sit down and think okay, three frames here, four frames anticipation, ease-out of six… I mostly trust my eyes. My gut. The feedback I'm getting from the shot.

I'm a guitar player. Started early with Satriani, Steve Vai, that kind of complex stuff. I know how to read and write music, but I never really enjoyed it. I trust my ear way more than the page.

And over 25 years of animating, I've met so many different kinds of animators. I'll never forget this one guy, brilliant, technical, knew every tool. He once explained to me with an actual mathematical equation how to make a quadruped walk. It kind of frightened me. He lost me after three minutes. 😅

I'm just not that person. I've spent my whole life trusting my feelings, acting on them, and as soon as I started creating, animation, music, whatever, I kept doing the same thing. My eyes are super trained from all the years. But every shot still feels like I'm starting from scratch. No prerequisites. Just looking at the thing and letting my gut take over.