Who Am I?
I’m an IT guy who has dabbled in creating music since the early days of MIDI. I created a number of fun little tunes in those days, using nothing but a Roland keyboard, Cakewalk, and accompaniment tools like Band-in-a-Box. Sadly, the state of digital music technology at the time was little more than “novelty” and certainly didn’t generate music of a quality that would be worthy of radio play.
I put musical pursuits aside for many, many years but started creating music again in December 2023 with some initial Christmas songs using the latest AI tools for generating background and accompanyments. This was a huge step up from things like Band-in-a-Box, but there were still some very rough edges to the end result output being produced. For the most part, the results simply weren’t quite on par with what you’d hear on the radio from a real music production house.
The flexibility and quality of the tools, and my experience and skills using them, have increased significantly over the last year and I am now producing music that would seem worthy of play along side any of the mainstream music hitting the airwaves.
One of the largest changes that’s taken place is that the early tools gave you little control over the actual melody, allowing only gross application of chord progressions. This resulted in music where the actual lead singing the lyrics was AI generated. This really pushes the boundary of where one could consider that they were the “creator”. The new tools now allow me to provide a digital audio file with the melody and vocals, along with the lyrics, and the AI tools only build the accompaniment and massage the vocals with auto-tune, reverb, and other tools commonly used in the music industry. I then tweak, adjust, and augment the resulting audio in the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software, changing individual parts, adding new parts, adding some harmony in the choruses, and so forth. This is now producing content where the creative part is truly from me and not from the AI, and the AI is just a labor saving device vs manually building all the accompaniment from digital samples and loops similar to what tools like Band-in-a-Box provide for Midi.
Music
I grew up surrounded by classical country music and received the full exposure to the legends of Country Music from the 50’s through the 70’s. Later, this continued with the era of Modern Pop-Country where a new style was set by performers like Garth Brooks, Brad Paisley, and Toby Keith along with those who kept to more contemporary country such as George Strait and Vince Gill. I’m got a warm spot for those that cross back and forth between the different flavors of Country Music, like Blake Shelton. All of these artist influence my musical efforts significantly.
I’m also a fan of nearly every style of mainstream music, although I’m not partial to the heavy metal groups, punk, rap, and for some reason improvisational jazz just doesn’t do anything for me.
As a result, the songs that I create for my own purposes are almost always Country. Whether it’s old-school, hard-core twang or more modern country-pop/rock it’s all content that I love creating.
I do, however, occasionally enjoy creating the odd folk, rock, pop, disco, or techno number. These are usually one-off specialty songs for a particular purpose or in response to a request from friends or family.
Instruments
Instruments I Play (Well enough for my purposes):
Piano, Classical Guitar, Electric Bass Guitar
New Instruments (Work in progress):
Fiddle, Scottish Highland Bagpipe (yes, bagpipes)
Instruments I Don’t Play Anymore (Was decent at one time):
Trumpet, Rhythm Guitar