Your eyes do not deceive you, and nothing’s wrong with your screen.

The Halted Clock is roughly two years old, and I’m quite excited to roll out the site’s new design today (if you’re reading this article via RSS or e-mail, click here to see the changes).

Clean Design

I’m a neat freak when it comes to web design, and this new layout is much easier to read. You’re not here to be overwhelmed by sidebar clutter; you’re here to write songs and hone your craft without distractions.

Old posts might look a bit ugly for a while because they were designed with the old layout in mind. Bear with me—I’ll be sifting through all 300+ articles in the archives to rewrite and reformat them. Because I’m insane.

More Tutorials

2012 will bring guides on chords, chord progressions, melodies, rhythms, lyrics, and performance skills to The Halted Clock. I’m dissolving the Gears section and using it as compost for these new guides.

Gears was a good idea—powered by my love of TV Tropes and The Book of Forms—but way too dry. I’ll be rewriting all of the Gears as juicy tutorials in the coming months.

Audio

Obviously no tutorial on chords or melodies could be explained entirely in writing. The new guides will be full of embedded MP3s and ear candy so you can actually hear what I’m talking about.

Dig In!

To celebrate the new design, I’ve got two new tutorials to share with you:

Song Structures 101

Thanks so much for reading, commenting, and making it fun to write these articles. The best is yet to come… Happy Holidays, everybody! 😀