I've always had a liking
for classical music. I think it must have started
with video games, however nerdy that is. There I was, six years old, playing Age of Empires ... and hearing Stephen
Rippy's synthesized soundtrack. Many of my favourite
composers are still ones who work in the video game industry: Michael Giacchino, Jason Hayes, and Jeremy Soule come to mind instantly.
I didn't really think about
making my own until high school.
If you've heard of my brother Caspian, you know he's a musician. He used to use a program called PowerTab, which I tried out... I hadn't studied any music theory and PowerTab didn't even force you
to use a time signature. The music I created back then lacked everything including regular meter, and you could hear it.
Flashback: 
Concerto, 2005
Later my band teacher, Mr. Kevin
Hayward, introduced me to a free, nifty program: Finale
Notepad. It had two strengths: it didn't sound
like crap, and it foisted basic music theory on the user. Of
course, it still wasn't perfect, but it worked for me. I
used it for two years, and the music is somewhat more acceptable.
Flashback: Joyful Canon, 2006
Flashback: Servant
of the Lord, 2007
But I was still just fooling around until I shelled out to get the full version of Finale itself, when I realized I knew how to do more than Notepad's limits. Besides a lot of neat things that ease the more tedious parts of composing, it comes with Garritan Instruments,
which are real freakin' instruments recorded for your use at home. Sweet!
Eventually I decided to put together everything I'd done on a single album: Gray
Gate Symphony (all the music is free now, though). It was a summary of all
my stuff so far, run through Garritan Instruments. It's still recent enough to delight me when I listen to it.
Flashback: Of Demons, 2008
The 2009 year was different in that I didn't get any new technology, but instead tried to work on actually improving my composing style. I regularly talk and discuss with fellow amateur composers (like Sean Patrick Hannifin, see the section below), and I'm teaching myself music theory out of books. My list of influences
has shifted from video game composers to the classical great, whose work I devour when I can find it. I'm also trying a lot of new stuff ;
Experimental piece: The Royal Say, 2009
Recently I've been writing pieces with more thought, planning, and time. The list at the top of the page has most of them, but I also made another CD, An Unfamiliar Place (bet you didn't see that coming), which was a collection of pieces with the theme of moving on from my familiar home, my comfort zone, to a new place - this year, university.
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For six weeks in late 2008 to early 2009, I worked on a side project called Free Daily Melody.
(Okay, so it's not really my project. It's Sean
Hannifin's.)
Each day, he
produced and uploaded a simple melody, played just by piano: the treble
line and the chords. I undertook
to orchestrate them all as well as I could. I tried to keep up with producing one a day. It was a challenge for myself because of the melodies' small format: I had to compose each piece quickly; I had to pack a coherent, listenable piece into only a few bars; and I had to scrounge for creativity since I had just one sequence of notes without much deviation allowed. Over time they got more and more developed, and I think I gained in several ways from this project.
Here are all the ones I completed while the project was underway.
= My
Orchestration; 
= Sean's Original
01 
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
As
with all my work, if you want to ask me about it, make suggestions, or
just get more of it,
contact me
.
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