My Stuff

Some of my compositions, playing, and other stuff I've done.

Here are a few of my compositions made using Soundtrap.

Dill

Bleeding Orange

Summer Games

Happy Mosquito

See if you can figure out where I sampled the drum track from!

My Instruments My default for whenever I get asked a fun fact about myself is the fact that I can play 6 instruments. However, as I'm sure you'll see quite a few of these are derivative of each other. Right now the list is drums, guitar, piano, melodica, ukulele, and bass, and I'd like to be able to throw theater organ in there one of these days. My first instrument was a small kiddie drum set, and when a plumber noticed my ability to hold a steady beat at the age of about four my parents decided I should have a "real" drum set, and not long after I began taking lessons. Around the time I was 8 or 9 I decided one instrument wasn't enough and that I ought to pick up guitar, so sure enough that Christmas Santa delivered a Fender 3/4 Squire under (or rather besides) the Christmas tree. At first I was mostly learning chordal songs and occasional tableture such as Wish You Were Here, but once I had the basics I was quickly throwing together classics such as "Happy Song" and "Song Number 2" (not to be confused with Song 2 from Blur.) Just months later I decided to put a plastic fantastic Yamaha keyboard we've had forever to good use and begin playing piano. At this point I'd had all of my base instruments down, and the rest were simply picked up because they were similar enough to the others. I got a bass for Christmas one year (I have very supportive parents... errr north pole elves!) after momentarily becoming enfatuated with Davie 504 on YouTube, the melodica I got to pass time during the first week or two of Coronavirus, and the ukulele was simply picked up at a garage sale. A dream. The Simon & Patrick. These days I'm primarily focusing on guitar, learning a lot of picking songs. Piedmont and cotton picking interest me especially. In general music where multiple parts are played by one person is especially of interest to me. This is probably why the theater organ in my favorite instrument, it allows you to play up to 6 (give or take) different instruments at once.

Other Stuff

Stuff that I had no hand in, but can wholeheartedly recommend.

The whole concert is amazing, but I always just gotta rewatch this section 2 or 37 times.

Discovering the Penguin Cafe

One of my favorite things is whenever I find new music. And I mean really new music. Stuff that I've never heared the likes of before. Some time ago it was Jazz, when I heared Stan Getz's "I Want to be Happy" in an old 3d graphics tech demo and dug in. Only a few weeks later I would be starting my high school career at Portland Community College, and among my first classes was Intro to Jazz History.

The most recent example of this little phenomena happening was when I was poking at YouTube one day and came across some of the strangest album art I'd ever seen. The thumbnail was old and crusty, and was listed at over 5 years old. Immediatly it was fairly obvious from the presentation of things that this wasn't for anyone. It was one of my favorite types of things, just something made for the sake of the enjoyment of the creator (I later found out my suspicions were very right.) Listening to the first few seconds I was very much about to click away, was this some self absorbent group of weirdos simply trying to be weird by making endless disconnected noises barely classifiable as music? But I gave it a bit longer. The random sounds fell slowly down to earth until they finally landed in some garden chairs and found their place in conjunction with each other. From here it's just a summers day where nothing needs to happen. Nothing changes unless it feels like it wants to.

Every time I listen I think I'm going to be bored, since most of it is simple repetition, but it creates such a nice atmosphere that you just want to sit there and bask in it. It's like a chorus to the song that you never want to end, that you wish could just repeat for one more time, only here it's the entire song, and it magically never gets old. It also has this travelling feeling to it. You always feel like you're moving, which I believe is a big part in why it succeeds in always staying interesting. To pick it apart I'd say it achieves this by never using just plain quarter notes in the backbeat; there's always something there to make it interesting.

This is probably just my life experience talking, but this gives the whole album has a very road trip feel to it. Never before have I heard a song that better encapsulates leaving for a road trip so early in the morning that the traffic lights still only flash red at least. I'll shut up now though, so you can go listen to it. Listen to it multiple times, in fact. I still haven't picked apart every sound I hear from it after a few good hours with it. It's on YouTube or Ebay, maybe on streaming. I wouldn't know, I don't use that stuff. Gumpy old man snarks aside, it's not hard to find, so you don't have any excuse. Better yet, find some new music of your own and write about it.

This really is just me being a bit ridiculous, but it feels a bit like driving without touching a drop of fuel.

Sorry :)