Hello everyone! Yes, an update and new music is long overdue!  I appreciate the continued interest from many of you and without making excuses the music has indeed been on a hiatus.  The problem is, as member of the male species, I am genetically unequipped to multitask particularly with two demanding mistresses – golf being my “other” has been occupying my free time as of late.  I’ve been on a mission to resurrect my once competitive golf game and it’s thankfully beginning to come about – but at the expense of time and focus I previously devoted to making music.

I am not sure how many golfer-musicians are amongst you but whilst I find these pursuits to be very complimentary – doing both simultaneously especially in between travels is difficult.

That said, I squeezed in a reasonable (piano) practice session today and I just let my fingers wander at the end to see what would come out… it wasn’t that bad! It’s amazing what you can produce when you’re mind is void of expectation and/or playing bias… In fact one of the other reasons I put aside music was nothing “new” was coming into my head – it needed to be cleared and it’s allowed me some time to explore some new things and genres.

Also, I had forgotten that before closing the previous chapter, I managed to complete remixes of some earlier tunes, Mischief and Scaramouche – except I forgot to post them onto the Player widget (above).

Take a listen to these with acoustic instruments courtesy of the fine folks at New York Brass.com!

Lastly, I wanted to express my appreciation to the many readers that have contributed to the long running commentary we have going on the Roland RD700GX and Yamaha CP1. Great experience and insight is being shared from all over the world – so check out the commentary! I’ll be back to the music as soon as I get my (golf) index back to a respectable number – unfortunately good golf is a demanding and elusive gal!

It’s taken some time, but I’ve finally completed the remix work on the prior tunes by replacing the “synthesized” brass and winds with real thing.  Once again, many thanks to Danny Flam and http://newyorkbrass.com!

This is Mischief – the very first tune written way back in early 2006… Must admit, it’s interesting to work on the old stuff because so much has changed in my technique and approach since then – I’d like to think for the better.  So our next step is to send the last three tunes off to Mastering and then they’ll be no excuse for not writing NEW MUSIC…

New music has been slow going as of late as the day job has been getting in the way… but as with anything, absence makes the heart grow fonder so I’m sincerely looking forward to crafting some of the many riffs I have going in the background into something cohesive.   In other words, more to follow, and yes – you can hold me to that!

Just a quick post to share the newly updated version of one of my early tunes, Scaramouche!   As mentioned, I’ve been working with my friends at New York Brass to provide “live record” brass and wind orchestrations/recordings for each of my tunes, and we’re almost finished – just one more after this.

I gave them quite a bit of creative license on this one because I was still learning how to use a MIDI wind-controller back when I wrote and recorded this tune; as usual they didn’t disappoint.  For comparison, you can listen to the original version still loaded in the Player Widget above; I won’t be replacing it until we finish the last tune and send them out for mastering.

Separate note, turns out Danny Flam (from New York Brass) is visiting Southern California on business this week so we get the pleasure of meeting in person!  This is an amazing new world we live in where so much can be done “virtually”…  but when the opportunity presents itself, face-to-face is always preferred.