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music: come on and sing it out
original music
Some of the first songs I ever wrote were really crappy. However, I learned a lot by sheer instinct and listening that I would later learn through organized education. A-B-A-B song structure, crescendos and decrescendos, and the like.
The majority of the music I make is created with Apple's GarageBand software, which I adore so much that it's almost sexual. It's really great. I first learned digital music making on early versions of Performer and Cubase, but I like Garageband a great deal more, and it was a lot cheaper.
As for hardware, as of November 2004 I'm still using the 550 mHz Powerbook G4 that you see in the photo here. I have an M-Audio Oxygen 8 USB MIDI Keyboard (bought for me very generously by a young lady named Antoinette Withers) and use an M-Audio MobilPre USB pre-amp for microphone amplification (which is used at home, I wanna start doing recording down at a studio in Torrance, but that's another story altogether as I need to research that).
I took several months of piano instruction as a child, much of which I remember. I also have some vague memories of how to play a drum set and took a very painful and largely unsuccessful semester of guitar instruction while I was at USC.
My ambitions are to include a great deal more strings and horns to my work, for a sense of grandeur and scope. I've been told that no matter what kind of song I'm singing, I end up turning it into a soul song. I consider that a compliment.
It should be noted that I have next to no intention of ever releasing my music on a large scale, as my normal affinities lie with bass and drum parts. Several years ago, I had the following conversation with a Motown Records PR person ...
"So, I hear you've got some songs, Hannibal. I'd love to hear them sometime."
(with shock and horror) "How the heck did you hear about that? Who told you?!??"
"Uh ... I was just asking. I mean, maybe I could help you, point you in the right direction ..."
"Tracy ..." (her name was Tracy, by the way) "... look, you're a nice sister, and we've worked together really well ... but you're a record industry person, and therefore completely untrustworthy. You'll never hear my music."
(sounding slightly hurt) "That's ... well, why make music at all? I mean, you don't wanna get signed?"
"My goal is to make the world's best album, put it in my stereo, and press play. That's what it's all about."
Tracy never understood that, and for the duration of our professional relationship kept hounding me about hearing my music. Considering how crappy I now think that music was, I'm glad she didn't.
Somehow, I'm still posting my music publicly, a strange dichotomy from my wildly private perspective, but what's life without some mystery?
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