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I am currently working on a musical collaboration with my cousin Tom, but I have gotten some requests to share a couple of these tracks more widely while we still work on the others. The project is a collection of songs about the pandemic.

“Going Viral” is the first recording to really showcase my new guitar, an Ibanez semi-hollow body. I just love the sounds that come out of this thing! One of my sons (the one who did The Ballad of the California Gold Rush) played bass on the track. [download mp3]

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One of my kids is studying US history in school this year, and decided to write and record a folk song about the California gold rush of 1849 for a school assignment. Of course I helped him with it. The actual assignment was to make something about the Westward Expansion, and it could have been a poster, drawing, a class presentation, or rewriting the lyrics to a song. He really went the extra mile on this one, and I hope he gets extra credit. The  song is based on The Ballad of Sally Anne, a Mark O’ Conner recording on the album The New Nashville Cats.

This was a 100% Linux production: Ardour, Dragonfly Reverb, Calf Studio Gear, AVL Drumkits, and x42 Plugins, on Linux Mint 19.3. I did the guitars, bass, and mandolin, and he did the vocals, drums, and piano synth programming. He also did most of the mixing and mastering, with a little coaching.

I’m super proud of my little geek boy! (more…)

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Last fall I met up with Michael Willis, developer of the Dragonfly Reverb plugins, to record a song he wrote. Michael had already programmed half of the song in midi tracks and recorded the clarinet intro, so I added the guitar and bass parts. A few weeks later we met again and finished these tracks to the end of the song, including the clarinet solo. (more…)

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Here is our family Christmas recording for 2019:

“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is an old European carol. The text first appears in historical records in about 1700 but is thought to be older, and the tune dates back to the 15th century. It is haunting and beautiful, full of pathos and tension, the kind of song that needs to be sung in an old cathedral. We didn’t have a cathedral handy, so we had to make do with Dragonfly Reverb instead.

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