Monday, April 18, 2011

Projects

If you get my emails, you know that I've got some fairly big news concerning my musical endeavors. For those of you who don't get my emails, let's change that:



Another thing before "big news;" some more background on myself.

Most people know me from my solo work. In high school I played in a few bands and had a great time, but it was a lot of work. Playing solo is easy to organize and a lot less work. Being in a band was frustrating and writing my own material has since been a lot more rewarding.

As you may have figured out, I'm once again in a "band" of sorts. I'd view it a lot more as a side project, but still it's a huge change for me. This project consists of singer/songwriter David Hampson, cellist Chris Yoder, and me. Unlike my solo work, this isn't anything technically dazzling. It's just for fun and for the sake of making music. It's accessible and has vocals. Basically, it's the side of music that my solo work is not.

So how did this get started? Well about a week David and I got together to work on some of his songs. Occasionally I help him out with some chord voicings and that was the original purpose. When we met up, we decided to work on something for the Messiah coffeehouse that there were auditions for the following day. While trying to figure out what to write, David briefly mentioned a song he had been working on to have cello with. Coincidentally, no more than 5 minutes later, Chris walked by the room we were playing in, on his way to practice a cello piece. One thing led to another and we ended up jamming for a couple hours, writing a song and jamming on a few others.

Tonight was coffeehouse, the trio's debut. We were able to close out the night with our nearly 10 minute long piece. Not progressive so much as improvisational. Everyone seemed to love it and we all had a great time. We'll be continuing to play together and will hopefully be playing out a bit over the summer or something like that. I'm looking forward to it.



In addition to this project, I've been talking to percussionist Mark Hunsburger about a project similar to the Andreas Kapsalis Trio. That will also be happening this summer as well. And... if time permits, I may start a project with singer/songwriter Joseph Strider. As these things materialize, more will come of them.

In a few days I'm also hoping to have a video of tonight's performance. Every time I try to get video of my solo stuff something doesn't work out, so hopefully video with this project will work better.



EDIT-----------
Here's a facebook link to a video of the song we played. Once I have the file, I'll embed the video on here and perhaps youtube? In the meantime, I don't think you can embed youtube videos. Hopefully everyone can see this:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=528093955022

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