About

Music

As a kid, I watched a lot of MTV. This was in its early days, when they actually played videos all day. When Van Halen came on, and Edward strut across the screen, creating brilliant fireworks for the ears with his guitar, I was hopelessly hooked. I had never heard anything like that, and I needed to figure out how to make noises like that. Although his influence doesn’t come across in my playing in any obvious way today, he was what got me (and countless others, of course) started on journey as a guitarist. My tastes soon expanded out from there, and I got pretty good at being able to play the music I was listening to.

Later, I was fortunate enough to attend the University of Miami jazz program. I knew very little about playing jazz at that time, but was naïve and thought I was hot shit when I arrived at school. Naturally, I got my ass handed to me by my teachers and supremely talented peers. I loved it. During my tenure there, I hung out with, studied with, and played with many absolutely amazing musicians.

I dabbled with classical guitar a little bit while in school. Years later, around 2013, I decided to make a serious study of it. I took private lessons where I worked on technique, repertoire, interpretation considerations—the whole shebang. The rigor and discipline of it were what I needed at the time, as I had sort of gotten away from playing for a while. I joined the Boston Classical Guitar Society, and later became a member of its board, where I still help drive that ship today.

These days, I play more electric than classical. I love them both, but the electric is where I feel most at home, as it allows the freest expression of musical ideas for me.

I’m also being more structured and intentional about writing music, which is something I’m always striving to do more of. Now in middle age, I’m less judgmental about what I do write, so as not to kill nascent ideas before they ever have a chance to thrive. It’s taken years to get to this point, and it’s still a work in progress. I feel it always will be.

Tools of the Trade

Guitarists, in particular, tend to be obsessed with their gear. I am far from immune from that affliction, so in that spirit, here’s a partial list of what I currently use to make a noise.

The guitars:

• Strandberg Sälen Jazz
• Strandberg Boden J7
• Bastard Son, a super-strat style partscaster
• Ice Queen, a fretless strat-style partscaster
• Gretsch Streamliner semihollow fitted with P90s
• Squier Jazz bass
• 2013 Concert Classical by Jeremey Clark at 52 Instruments

For amplification, I use a Deluxe Reverb clone which I built, a Vox AC15, The Amp 100 by Milkman, and a Fishman Loudbox for my acoustic guitars.

For pedals, there are too many to list here, but some of my faves are the Chase Bliss Thermae, Brothers AM, and Mood Mk II, a Strymon Flint, and a King of Tone clone that I also built.

Technology and Design

I’ve always been engineering minded, curious about what makes things tick. I would want to deconstruct things to figure them out, to understand them. To get a better handle on their inner workings, I’d build things from scratch, or fiddle with things to make them more to my liking. I did this with guitars, crude effects boxes, and with programming. I had a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 2 as a kid, and while I didn’t really know what I was doing, I would get magazines with BASIC source code for simple games printed out in them and write them out to see what they did. I don’t remember the specifics of those games now, but I do remember the sense of wonder, awe, and power of being able to conjure functioning programs into existence with a few lines of code that I pecked into a keyboard.

In college, I took it upon myself to be the graphic designer for the bands that I was playing with at the time. I would make posters for gigs and other visual assets we’d need. It was all very crude, but I was enjoying figuring out how to use early design and page layout tools. Aldus Pagemaker was my jam.

Shortly before the turn on the millennium, I was out of school and growing disillusioned with the realities of making a living as a working musician. I was making next to no money, and more importantly, the gigs I was getting weren’t the sort I dreamed about when I was younger. They weren’t any fun.

But I had these other interests, other skills. This coincided neatly with the dot-com boom, and this capital-I Internet thing was weird and new and frothy and exciting, poised to change the world for the better (hah!). So I taught myself some HTML and combined the page layout ideas with the code authoring I found so powerful as a kid, and I enjoyed it. In those days, you could fall backwards into work if you knew what a blink tag was and could code a page layout with nested tables and spacer gifs. Thus, a web development career was born.

In the years since, I’ve built many web properties for companies tiny, huge, and in between. I ran an independent consultancy for a decade, and have spent a lot of time in Agency world. I’ve tried and failed to launch a few startups. Turns out I’m better at building these things than marketing them.

And after all this time, I still enjoy the craft of it; this site is a good example of the current state of my craftsmanship, as it were.

Contact Me

The best way to contact me is to email me at me@michaelbester.com. I read it all, even if I don’t always manage to reply in a timely manner.

Elsewhere online, you can find music I post on YouTube and Instagram. I also enjoy logging and reviewing movies on Letterboxd (you ever think about what a thoroughly old-timey word movie is? "Forget these still pictures, Ethyl. We’re going to see a movie!"). I love Letterboxd because it is a vestige of the early social web—it’s blessedly algorithm-free, and as far as I know, it’s not trying to sell your data. People’s eclectic tastes are far weirder and more interesting than the brain-smoothening gavage that are social media algorithms.

Colophon

This site is hand-coded in Nova and built with Eleventy. While I write just about all the code myself the old fashioned way, I did make light use of Claude Code to build out custom functions for optimizing images and audio handling. I did have to clean up after it a bit, but it’s an impressive pair programmer. I’ve codified my stance on generative AI as it pertains to this site over on the AI page.

I’m a bit of a typography nerd, so I’m particular about the type layout and balance. I’m also a firm believer in the embracing the inherent unknowns of designing for the web. So while I tried to make solid typographic choices, I am not loading any custom typefaces here, and instead, making use of typefaces you already have on your system. It may look slightly different from one system to the next, or even one browser from another, but it’ll still look (I hope!) good. And it’ll load in no time at all.

Basic analytics are collected in Plausible, which is GDPR compliant and respects your privacy. Invasive tracking is gross, and I don’t want to subject you to that. We get too much of that elsewhere.

This version of the site was launched in August 2025 with a bunch of new content on it. I launched the original version of the site in 2013.