Born in the great northwest, I love the rain and the trees and cannot imagine living anywhere else. I've visited some warmer climates, and while they are a nice place to visit, I am always very happy to get back home to the hanging moss and dripping trees.
In the early 80's I became interested in computers, which were still very rudimentary. However, I could see the power of being able to program a computer to perform repetitive functions for you. My first computer (that I purchased with my allowance) had a whopping single kilobyte (1k) of RAM and stored its programs on analog cassette tapes. I stayed up for three days straight after I received it by mail and taught myself to program. I refused to sleep until I could bend that tiny computer to my will. I wrote a calendar program that worked as long as you didn't turn the computer off, and only lost about 4 minutes a day due to the unstable timing of early processors. This was a Timex-Sinclair 1000. Later I upgraded to a Commodore Vic-20, which had 5k of RAM. I was living in high style.
Years later I combined my love for music with my affinity for computers, and purchased an Atari 520 ST, followed by a 1040 ST, both of which had built-in MIDI and allowed me to sequence arrangements on the screen instead of using numerical coding on a cludgy dedicated sequencer. Using Notator, the best MIDI software I'd ever seen (years ahead of its time), I was able to create complex scores and what I thought were excellent mixes and simulations of real bands. Listening to those old pieces, I now realize that my sounds were not as advanced and transparent as I thought, but compared to the alternatives of the day, they were pretty good. These days I do extemsive recording and producing on a PC-based music workstation. Listen to some of my projects on my music page.
After getting sidetracked for many years in engineering related fields, including computer aided design, I eventually decided to get a formal education in computers. I now hold degrees in networking and programming, and certificates in Linux/Unix administration and database management.
I never set out to be a professional writer, except for a few fantasies as a child about being a novelist. My early attempts at storytelling resulted in 5 to 10 pages of drivel followed by early-onset writers block. I always had interesting ideas, but had no clue about the mechanics of developing a story; plotting and timelining were not part of my vocabulary. Despite this, though, I somehow got sucked into the writing field.
As an avid reader, I had developed an inherent understandgin of the language (though I never did exceptionally well in high-school english classes), and I was able to parley my drafting and diagramming skills, in conjunction with my networking degree, into a contract for the now defunct Washington Mutual, documenting their proxy redesign. During this contract I also became familiar with managed testing of networks and other skills that I would leverage into a career at Microsoft as a programming writer.
Programming writers are a very select subset of technical writers, with an emphasis on interpreting code and describing its function to non-programmers/IT professionals. As a programmer writer, I have had assignments involving animation, music composition and production, curating technical art collections (tables and diagrams), drafting presentations and presentating them, and of course writing and editing technical documents and articles. I have made educational videos, instruction manuals, help files, and even architected an SDK documentation schema.
Since becoming a technical writer, I have revisited creative writing and found that I have some talent, but have yet to complete an entire novel. I have several projects in various stages of completion, and became involved with a publishing house in order to gain insight into the process and practice of publication. This led to a collaborative writing project that started out with a lot of energy and fun, but slowly degenerated into an excercise in futility.
Nonetheless, I continue to foster fantasies of being the next Stephen King, Dean Koonts, or James Patterson. Fantsies are fine as long as you don't invest too heavily in them. I, of course, cannot heed my own warning...
I began fiddling with music at a very early age. My grandparents had an antique upright grand piano, and hidden in the bench was a book explaining the basics of music; the staff, the notes, basic timing, and such. It was illustrated with helpful little elves that appealed to me because they shared my diminutive size. Being able to read already helped, and having alot of time alone with the piano was no small gift, either. I learned simple children's songs from the music in the book, but also used my ears to figure out current pop songs. A year later, at the age of four, I received an air powered organ for christmas, and the rest, as they say, is history. I've been playing ever since.
In my early teens I picked up the guitar, which had
seemed completely alien to my hands previously. Suddenly, it made more sense,
and I began writing chord progressions and developing finger-picking skills. I
wrote my first solid guitar piece at the age of 14, and more than a decade later
finally figured out what chords I was using.
I played the following instruments in school:
Somewhere along the line I picked up sax and started branching out into other stringed instruments as well, such as banjo, ukulele, mandolin, etc. Furthermore, with the advent of sampling and sequencing, I can do a fairly accurate representation of most iunstruments that I don't actually know how to play. These include the brass family and many more exotic instruments such as Shakuhachi, Sitar, and Kalimba.
I began writing music quite early, developing variations of patterns and progressions that I could call my own. However, I didn't begin addiung words until puberty, where my awkward shyness and general communication difficulties with the fairer sex led me to write many love songs about unrequited desires in the hope that some beautiful young woman would hear one and fall madly in love with me. Alas, it was not meant to be. That didn't prevent me from writing even more songs of unexplored passion for decades before finally turning my sights to unexplored territory, songs about life, fantasy, and failure. In other words, love songs in disguise...
My affinity for recording began in the early 80's, when a friend bought an analog four-track recorder that ran on cassette tapes. I had already mastered the skill of making mix tapes onto cassette from vinyl, so recording instruments came intuitively. I spent many nights alone in my room making complex arrangments using MIDI and live instrumnets, bouncing down tracks to make room for more layers, and making the most godawful recordings ever heard. I really miss those days...
A few years later, my father provided me with a cutting edge digital recording rig including an ADAT 8-track digital recorder and a 16-channel mixing board. Soon I was discovering the gaps in my musical engineering knowledge base. I could no longer blame it on the poor recording equipment.
As much as I loved synthesizers and effects, I didn't get bogged down in the technology, but instead concentrated on creating better recordings and better mixes. Only time and practice could ultimately deliver the experience I needed to hone my skills to a professional-sounding edge. In the last decade or so, I finally feel like I am able to accurately reproduce the sound I hear in my head.
These days I record on my PC using Cakewalk Sonar. I began using Cakewalk years ago, starting with Cakewalk 6, and have progressed all the way to the latest, Sonar Platinum. I love working in the digital domain, and am capable of taking a song from arrangment, to recording, to mixing and mastering, without ever hitting the analog world. Only the inital inputs are analog. The final product is a CD-quality recording that is (hopefully) comparable to anything you hear on the radio.
I joined Songwriters in Seattle in 2013 and my life entered a new chapter. Despite having played with a few garage bands in the 80's and 90's, I had never performed as a solo artist. In 2013, I began playing open mics, playing all original music, singing my own songs, with no support from bandmates, and nobody to hide behind. At first it felt overly intimate and extremely embarrassing to share my thoughts and feelings so openly with people I didn't know. I would play too fast, sweating bullets, anxious to get the *#(% off the stage. But I kept coming back and forcing myself to perform. Eventually, I began to relax and gained conifdence that even if I wasn't a stellar performer, I at least wouldn't get booed off the stage. Seattle audiences are so supportive.
Since then, I have played showcases and hosted events for Songwriters in Seattle. Now, in fact, I have become a member of the board of directors and help steer the organization. It has been immensely rewarding and has fostered great personal and professional growth. They are a great bunch of people and are so helpful to anyone needing anything musical, from production to promotion, performance to composition. I am so grateful that I discovered this group.
In the last few years I have produced songs for myself and others. Several of these can be heard on my music page. Most notable of these latest projects are:
I am currently working on a six-song EP for my friend David Guilbault, and one additional song that will not appear on the EP. I am also composing a musical that will tie together many of my own songs into a full-length story.