Other Music

I’m am often asked, “What is it that you do…exactly?” The answer to that is complicated.

Yes, I perform at coffee shops and other venues, mostly Celtic and American folk, but there’s more than that.

New Age Jazz

Back when I was in college I was a huge fan of John Jarvis, a session musician who was featured rather prominently on the MCA Master Series in the late 1980’s, a sampler of music from (appropriately enough) MCA. I fell in love with his keyboard work, and when I got a MIDI workstation of my own (see Tools of My Trade, below) I started writing music using his as inspiration.

This is one of my early works, an instrumental piece called Crossing Old Bridges, written somewhere around 1995. There are no pre-programmed tracks or samples here. It’s all me.

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Music Recreation

I was asked by our church children’s choir director if I could rework one of their songs, removing the vocals so that the kids would have a clean instrumental to sing to. Well, no, you can’t truly remove vocals and have a quality piece of music left – equalizing out the voices also removes a large part of the instruments – but I could and did recreate the song from scratch.

There are about thirty tracks in the finished composition, a mix of MIDI and audio (the cymbal wave, for instance, which my MIDI workstation can’t recreate at all), and I am very proud of the result.

(Before you ask, no, I didn’t use any preprogrammed drum tracks. Layers, yes, but I built those layers by hand.)

First, the commercial version

We Adore You – The original track

Next, my re-creation.

We Adore You – The re-creation

The Tools of My Trade

For those of you who want the full scoop, I use a fifteen year old Roland XP80 MIDI workstation, a five year old PC, and Cakewalk Sonar 4 Producer Edition for this work. I also have two acoustic guitars: a 1998 Samick that’s better in the studio than live and is my “outdoor” guitar, and a 2002 Taylor 510LE for concerts and other indoor venues.