The answer is “not really”. I chose to take Calculus III as my lone summer class, you know, since it’s a class that deserves much time and care from every student. But what I didn’t know is that it would suck my time like a parasite, just clinging on, constantly urging me to do more equations… just one more equation…
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It took me a summer of recording and a winter of mastering, but finally I am done with my newest project, an album called Soundtrack. It was easy to just mess around with an acoustic guitar and write simple songs before, and that’s cool, but I wanted to try something different. When I listened to other albums with huge instrumentation backing the solo artist like Julian Casablancas’ recent album Phrazes for the Young, I thought, why can’t I do that? So I studied drum machines, orchestra arrangements, electronic bass, vocal manipulation, etc, and made this short album.

Hopefully, this will be “Disc 1″ of a three disc Soundtrack album. The discs being separated by color (red, blue, and green), and each disc sounding completely different. This one will be red. We’ll see if it expands into that. I’m done writing the music for the other discs, but who knows, once I’m done producing them maybe they’ll be their own album. (more…)

Have you ever wanted to play dodgeball with watermelons? Well, if you haven’t, that’s reasonable. But if you have, oh man, you should be excited! For Fall of 2009, three programmers and myself made a multiplayer modification of the popular game Half-Life 2 as our final semester project. We called this feast for the eyes Melonballer. (more…)

I don’t know, I just saw those cool Lincoln commercials and thought… “What if I put this song I already made over it?” CRAZY, right?! The song I’m talking about, “The Machines” is an end fragment of one of my songs from the album I just made. I started humming it at Panda Express then made it when I got home. But you know what, I actually think this fits pretty well. I hope Lincoln sends me a free car for all my work. (more…)

On Christmas Eve, my sister Janessa (who is also into making music) and I decided to do a cover of a classic Simon & Garfunkel song, Sound of Silence. I remember exactly where I was when I got into this song. I was sitting on the couch of my dorm at BYU (when I was actually there) playing music on my computer while my roommate Dean did something nearby. He was a real stickler for 80’s hair rock like Styx, so it was kind of hard for us to find mutually liked music. But when we landed on The Sound of Silence and we both liked it, well, I guess I just assumed that wasn’t a fluke. (more…)