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Away from a keyboard

Snowboarding, guitars, and taking hardware apart.

The work side is on the home page

Andrew carving a turn through soft snow, spray coming off the board.
Lake Louise, Alberta

Snowboarding

I snowboard as much as the season allows, mostly on ungroomed terrain. Most of my winters are built around getting out to the mountain when I can.

Andrew standing with his snowboard at the top of a run, snow-covered peaks behind him.
Lake Louise, Alberta

Guitars and amps

Twelve instruments at last count. The amps took longer to put together. That rig came together over several years of buying things secondhand and repairing what was wrong with them.

The bass amp arrived with corroded output jacks, so I opened it up and replaced them.

The blue one is the current favourite: a Yamaha Revstar Standard, modded with a killswitch and a kill button.

Five electric guitars and a bass on stands and hung on the wall of Andrew's room.
Some of the collection.
A Boss amp head on a Behringer 4x12 cabinet, with an Ampeg, a Fender combo and a practice amp alongside.
The rig, assembled secondhand over several years.
A blue Yamaha Revstar Standard with a white racing stripe, laid on a hardwood floor, with a killswitch toggle and a kill button added alongside the stock controls.
Yamaha Revstar Standard, with a killswitch and kill button added.

Some of it ends up recorded. This is one of the instrumentals, unreleased and unfinished in the way most of them are.

Untitled instrumental

Produced by Andrew Polyakov

0:00--:--
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This is on the experimental side of what I make.

Albums I keep going back to

  • Sol-fa

    Asian Kung-Fu Generation · 2004

  • Colourmeinkindness

    Basement · 2012

  • Spectre

    Blu-Swing · 2023

  • Mint Jams

    Casiopea · 1982

  • Dispensation

    Jimsaku · 1996

  • Nichijou Shometsu

    kinoue64 · 2025

  • Analog Is On

    Michael Gray · 2007

  • Movin' Melodies

    ATB · 1999

  • Now I See the Light

    toe · 2024

  • VISTA

    toconoma · 2020

  • amp-reflection

    school food punishment · 2010

  • Highvision

    Supercar · 2002

A PlayStation 3 motherboard on an iFixit project mat, with fresh thermal paste on the Cell and RSX chips.
A PS3 mid-repaste. It runs the TV in my living room now.

Building and fixing things

I build and work on computers, and I mod iPods and other entertainment hardware for fun. My main music player is a 1 TB iPod running Rockbox, because my FLAC collection stopped fitting on anything you can buy in a store. The board above is a PS3 I stripped down to repaste and mod; it is the media player under my TV now.

None of this is professional experience. It is the same troubleshooting though: it worked yesterday, it does not today, and you find out by checking one thing at a time.

Get in touch

Open to internships and new-grad roles for 2027.

Email meGitHub