Ahhh!!! The music! Sadly the part of my life that until now was stuck on the back burner because I never had the time. I play guitar every day for at least a half hour (as I have for 33 years) and I play keyboards a few times a month but now I get to do LOTS more with my music and I couldn’t be happier about that! Never had such a great excuse before!
As for style- that’s where things start to get more complex. And again I couldn’t be happier. My music style is all over the place. I’m very lucky to come from a hugely musical family. My Dad’s parents met while they were professional opera singers and he was a barbershop quartet singer. My Mom’s Dad was a singularly gifted pianist, my sister has a degree in Musical Theater (as well as her law degree) and my brother’s an acoustical engineer. My fondest memory is of falling asleep listening to my mother practicing piano. I grew up awash in music. Just as everyone should.
So when it comes to the music for Surreal Orange its the perfect opportunity to experiment with a ton of different styles. Not that I think genres are really even a thing anymore but for the sake of communication I’ll put it this way: There will definitely be lots of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal type stuff but most of the music is much more likely to be more of a psychedelic trip-hop, hip-hop, jazz, electronica type stuff. Its going be a pretty trippy show. Plus there will be lots of orchestral music and more ambient music as well. Just like with everything else I have folders of folders with bits of music I’ve been working on slowly forever as a foundation.
At first all of the music for the show will be from me- but that’s more for convenience than vanity. As time goes on I definitely want to start inviting other musicians as well as artists to contribute. Its very important that this world feels truly infinite- one artist can’t pull that off. I’ll be needing other talents and the personality they’ll bring.
When it comes to software I must admit I lucked out a bit there. I was using Cakewalk to make music back in the early 2000’s and stuck with it as it evolved into SONAR which was (and still is technically) an awesome DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). Problem was a little while back the morons over at Gibson decided to buy Cakewalk out entirely and then did NOTHING with the company at all. It would make sense if they had been a competitor, I guess, but they definitely weren’t so who knows what Gibson had planned but this meant the program all my music was on was no longer current or supported. I was more than a bit concerned. But thankfully the awesome peeps at Bandlab decided to resurrect Cakewalk as a free DAW which is basically the last full version of SONAR and totally saved me! Thank you guys so much!!! 🙂 Its a full Pro level DAW and handles everything I’ve thrown at it.
As I said its free and you can get it now by joining Bandlab here.
