Listen to 'E Five'

The song was born of a guitar riff.  The main driving riff of the song was something that happened during a practice session.  It was a sound that I really liked just for the qualities of the notes and the acoustics of the guitar that I was using.  No extra distortion or effects were needed to enhance the intriguing blending of the notes.

There was a certain ringing, or twang quality to the notes that I found particularly unique to this riff.  It is probably because of the rapid…

Listen to 'A Band of Silver'

Sometimes when you are feeling overwhelmed by the worst aspects of humanity, something occurs that reminds you that not all is lost. One of the less admirable qualities that humanity displays is materialism.  Admiring things that look nice, that are eye catching, or exquisite, is understandable.  Bright and shiny things tend to catch the eye and seem to communicate something that the ordinary does not.  But when these objects are looked at as elevating the owner or conveying…

I'm very happy to be close to wrapping up the recording project for the latest album.  It should all be done a week after this post.  There will be some more time devoted to getting the administrative work done for copyright and publishing, but August should be the latest time of release.  Additional time will be needed to hear the album on each platform such as YouTube, Tidal, and Spotify, but the album will be "out there" in the world shortly.

I last blogged about the recording of "Autumn Hours" I…

Over a month and all is well......I wrote this post around early to mid-May, but forgot to post it.  So here's a bit of time travel for my thoughts about the album project.....

The previous post was about two weeks ago (late April 2020).  It looks like I was twelve days in last year when I stopped posting updates, so I'm close to a full month of work on the project.  I spent a lot of time on the project over the past two weeks and the progress has been very exciting for me.  I am still rehearsing two…

Once again life took over my plans and last year's recording project had to be put on hold while personal things were taken care of and the full time job got its share of my life.  My website service was merged into another company, I had to take care of family for a while, my time was almost completely absorbed by the job routine for several months, it was a bit of an adventure up to the whole coronavirus take over of the world economy.

In February 2020, as the coronavirus emergency was heating up, my time…

I got behind on the blogging with the activity of the holidays and the excitement of everything including the album project.  Spending an hour or two here and there helps to make progress.  Each take of "Winter Solstice" showed improvements, but it was quite a task to get everything the way I wanted in a precise performance.

Although many songs are part of my rehearsals, I have set them aside for recording sessions to focus on "Winter Solstice".  On Day 11, January 4, 2019, the focus and the many takes…

On December 14 and 15 I spent a few hours each day on the album.  The instrumental Winter Solstice is coming along.  The performances I've recorded are not quite there, so it's more takes to try and get it right.  I could Frankenstein the song, but that's not the route I want to take.

On Saturday I made good progress on the song Autumn Hours.  It is a song I've worked on for many years off and on trying to capture the feeling of autumn that I experience each year.  I think I've made a break through and…

Today's short session was about 2 to 3 hours.  I focused on trying to finish Winter Solstice.  The performances get better every few times I try it, but there's still a ways to go before I have finished.  I'm hoping day 3 yields the results I want.

I've definitely learned patience with the recording process.  My first recording project was filled with frustration, mostly because my expectation was that songs that I have performed hundreds of times would be easy to record.  Something about the record…

The launch of my next big music project was on December 12.  I had reached that point where something felt right - I had some free time on my calendar, I made progress on some important songs, and I had been reviewing some new recording software.  One task seemed to flow into another and it just felt like now is the time.

I have set some rather ambitious goals for this project.  I have listed 20 songs that are in different stages of completion.  Some are completely finished except for the recording…