Prologue

Though I have never forayed into the realm of book writing, I imagine that the last page typed is the volume's preface. This is odd at a glance because it is the first material to pass in front of the readers' eyes, but a deeper look offers a sensible reason: an author can not be expected to know how to prepare her audience for the ensuing adventure until said adventure is inked onto a page somewhere.

In a similar manner, I have been crafting a new piece of music that will perch at the front end of the Redline Project final album. Called Prologue, the short instrumental composition draws heavily from elements that belong to the final track. It also steals from the frenetic and tense textures peppered throughout the hour of recorded material. Its a veritable 'coming attractions' of sorts.

If I have learned anything over the course of the past five months, it is this: do not under any circumstances judge a piece of music to be good on the night it is tracked. What seems a stroke of genius the first day become pretty good the second, decent the third, tolerable the fourth, and finally sours to audio vomit once the fifth day arrives.

Quite the preface to say that I think the Prologue is fairly rad as it stands. Will it make the cut? The five days older and wiser version of me will have to see about that.

Daunting Task

Tonight, for the first time since the Redline Project commenced, I attempted to record myself playing a drum set.

Let me dive right in with an admission. Neatly tucked away into the boiler room closet (a no-no by any semi-serious drummer's standards), my citron yellow set of Eames has been collecting pollen, cockroaches, and other such annoyances for about four months.

As I picked up the sticks (Regal Tip 8A Maples for those who care), I realized in an instant that my excitement to play far exceeded my ability to produce coherent beats. Years have come between me and my serious pursuit of the instrument, and a solid four months elapsed since the last time I touched the old tubs in any form.

I feel as though I am down in the count long before I even step up to the plate. I have no fancy equipment for capturing a decent drum sound - just a trusty, borrowed condenser microphone. I plug the stout mic into the mixer, a dubious smirk plastered across my face. A few clicks later with headphones securely cupping my ears, I am off and running.

Rust creeps its way around my fingers as ivy climbing a collegiate brick facade, and the feeling of Ace bandages tightly wrapped plagues my limbs. All hope seems lost as I scour around for a little muscle memory. Two measures to go until my cue. One measure to go. One, two, three, four...

A surge of energy spikes from nowhere, and I a steady rhythm pulses from the wooden beads of my Regal Tips. The groove thickens as measures pass. I close my eyes and let the music swirl through my cerebellum, reveling in the woven phrases and all but forgetting that I am laying down a track.

The passage ends, and I am shaken from the trance and settle into my office chair for a listen to the music that just unfolded.

One universal truth about recordings: they do not lie. My euphoric grin has faded into a puzzled grimace. The rhythms are off, the dynamics are terrible, and the beats are juvenile - not to mention the recording sounds as if it were tracked in an echoey basement (oh wait, it was).

Attempt one: fail. I have the weekend to figure out how to shake some cobwebs free and lay down some beats again.

Off the Grid

Tonight I completely reworked a recording originally posted at the end of January. The title is "Sing Silently," a song about a little girl I know who has trouble sleeping after a violent break-in occurred in her home.

In the name of science, I attempted to record without any click track or time grid in place. I was hoping the lack of rigid time structure would lend an organic aesthetic to the music (a bare composition of voice with a few acoustic guitar tracks).

Fail.

Aligning tracks and editing out the no-nos without the help of organized time stamps is all but impossible for a noob like me. With practice, patience, and time, I could get the hang of recording without the click, but time is a commodity unknown to the Redline Project.

Tomorrow I will attempt a redo of the redo, this time with the familiar metronome clicking sense into my soul as I lay in the tracks.

On the sunny side, I tweaked the setup of my recording rig today, eliminating some unwanted microphone noise from the mix. Though this does not compare with completing a song for the final project, a cleaner audio signal is nevertheless an important accomplishment.

Recording the Rain

Precipitation meandered through metro Atlanta today as it should this time of year. The atmosphere was mostly a haze of clouds and mist punctuated by brief, dramatic startles of cracking thunder and the incessant pounding of voluminous rain. For a handful of magnificent minutes, spiders of lightning fragmented the sky into sharp shards as plinks of hail nipped away at shingles and shutters.

Sprawled on the carpet with mostly shut eyelids, the sounds of the storm whispered calmness to my inmost parts. The symphony of the moment was nothing shy of perfection; how thrilled I was to have the ability to capture the audio and remember the event.

I strung a cable from my mixer to a condenser microphone pressed against the open windowsill, clicked a few buttons in Logic, and let the tape roll.

The storm track carpets some sparse synth music in the scratch recording below. The looped music is on the ambient side, perhaps even a touch dental. If you listen carefully, you may be able to pick out the high-pitched taps of hail at certain points.

Massive Milestone

What would probably be a measly accomplishment for most professional recording artists feels downright monumental to me. This morning at 11:00 am, I wrapped up a preliminary song track for the Redline Project final recording.

Is the song actually finished and ready for mastering? Hopefully not. I intend to learn a massive amount between now and the album's final mixdown, and I anticipate looking back at this track with loathing at some point during the project's course.

So why the jubilee? This first complete track represents what I once considered all but impossible. A mere three months ago, I hadn't the vaguest sense of how to get the music of my imagination into listenable form. As I type today, I am hearing the tangible decibels of a song I wrote and recorded. Each instrument (about 15 total) heard is something I played, and the vocals, though heavily edited, are mine too. What a buzz.

The complete song is called Barefoot Commons. Its story portrays a girl and a boy from dramatically different backgrounds who discover equally intense pains and joys in life. Here is a selection of phrases:

Little black boy from Roxbury Station
Little white girl from the highrise on the hill
Black hand, white hand, gripping each other
Fifteen miles, a world apart
Drink the moment at the barefoot Commons

For complete lyrics, click here.

The song's characters are children from the city of Boston. Beyond the traditional instruments utilized in the recording, I selected sonics that reflect the playfulness of childhood and speak of the urban setting, including the percussive banging of kitchen pans and a carefully-placed elevator bell sound.

Any elation I feel in this moment is met with great trepidation as I consider my next steps. If I am to accomplish the release of a full-length album, I will have to walk this winding road at least a dozen more times during the next six months. This seems a good thought for tomorrow; today I shall bask in the bliss of this small but significant step.

Long Overdue

From the earliest days of the Redline Project, Found Sound has been an important concept. Decibels can be heard in the 'Scratch Recordings' column that emanated from cups of water, canned vegetables, U.S. currency, a nose-hair trimmer, paper tearing, and even the flush of a porcelain bowl.

It is hard to believe I made it this far into the project without laying down some good old pots and pans for a percussion fest. When I was in fifth grade and wanting desperately to own a drum set, my room was always littered with metal implements from the kitchen. It was these bang-a-thons (along with a few other circumstances) that finally caved my parents' wills to keep drums out of the house and out of my life.

During this fertile time of musical development, these were the sounds I was hearing and creating. Tonight's exploration was a throwback to the artistic explorations of my teenaged self that put a bounce in my step.

I rummaged through the cupboards tonight and found a few items with sonic possibilities. The sounds paired with a delicious riveted cymbal like bordeaux and brie. I hope you enjoy the quick scratch recording posted below.

Something about the Redline Project makes me feel like I am 12 again. Maybe this is inspired by rapping on items that clearly are not drums, or perhaps because I have shirked laundry duty for days in favor of working out some tunes.

Molton Blobs of Glorious Bliss

No later than 48 hours after discovering the Logic's supposedly blessed Pitch Correction plug-in, I had to acknowledge a dissatisfaction with its shortcomings. Another 24 past before I tripped over another fine discovery, this time on YouTube.

Like a sip of merlot after a month of grape juice, Celemony's Melodyne plug-in is a dynamic analog workstation that makes patty-cake out of even the most daunting of vocal editing tasks. How do I know? They offer a free test drive of the product, available for download from their website.

Though users of this demo are unable to save their edits, it allows a taste of all functions, including the amazing pitch shifter. This technology analyzes any inputted track, slices it up, and places a visual representation of the audio onto a piano-based grid. The resulting red and yellow daubs of sound, nicknamed 'blobs' by Celemony, may be individually slid onto the right pitch, or any other pitch for that matter, yielding on-key audio with virtually unprocessed sound.

So the company claims anyway; I had to see the magic for myself. I loaded the 75 megabytes onto my hard drive and popped in the chorus from a recent recording - one that I know has blatant pitch issues. About thirty mouse clicks later, my jaw hit the desk. There were vocals coming through the headphones that sounded a lot like my voice, only each note it sang was strong and perfectly perched on the notes of the song's key. Marvelous.

The demo of Melodyne presents a strong case for its hefty purchase price of $299. I wish today's test run would save so the readers of this blog could experience the miracle of Melodyne for themselves. For now, you can either take my word for it, or you can visit YouTube and type in Melodyne for a sample.

I only spent $80 for a used copy of Logic Express (yes, it is original software with serial numbers and install discs), so nearly $300 for a vocal editor workstation sends a few shivers down my cheap spine. As meaningful lyrics begin to emerge from the thin end of my pencil, I shudder increasingly at the thought of ravaging these songs with the destructive weapon of my sad little voice. A big purchase like Melodyne sure is tempting; I will have to think it over.

What you will hear below developed out of my excitement over the Melodyne plug-in, though it is completely raw, unedited vocals, as I am sure will be obvious as you listen through. The music is a simple, catchy groove and an extensive amount of nonsense vocalizing. The scratch recording also shows my first attempt at laying down any sort of live percussion: a Remo version of a djembe drum makes a cameo on this frigid February evening.

Sweetie Pie Day

I am not big on most holidays. My wife generally is, but neither one of us are pinned under the commercial spell of Valentine's Day. We skip the gifts/flowers/chocolates ordeal and instead opt to spend the day together doing something fun and maybe out of the ordinary.

Today we toured the Cyclorama, one of the world's largest paintings that depicts the events of the Civil War's Atlanta Campaign. A painting in the round that has the same square yardage as a football field, this piece took nine artists two years to produce. Its weight is around 10,000 pounds with a circumference of 358 feet.

This is all irrelevant to the point of this blog, except that this epic work dwarfs my tiny recording project and therefore gives me much hope. Surely if this group of ambitious creatives could render a milestone such as this cycloramic painting, so can I accomplish the goals of the Redline Project.

That's all for now. The Day of the Sweetie Pie is not yet over, and solo creative project blogs are not the most conducive to romance. So off I go.

I leave you with a minute's worth of groove I threw together yesterday. I intend it to become the foundation for some lyrics I wrote yesterday as well. Wishing everyone the warmest of sentiments on your candy message hearts.

Royal Flush

Here's a quick post to accompany an equally brief audio experiment. A further exploration in the concept of found sound, today's scratch recording features a variety of morning tones not commonly associated with music.

The recording commences with a brief sustained tone for each sample, and then the madness ensues.

In addition to digging further into the found sound concept, the recording available below represents my first sampling effort in Logic Express.

The basic plot of sampling:

1) Collect a variety of sound samples. In this case, all samples are new recordings, but sampling can utilize pre-recorded material as well.

2) Assign the samples to keys on a midi instrument. I routed these eight sound bytes to eight notes on my M-Audio Keyrig 49.

3) Play just as you would any keyboard instrument like a midi piano or drum set.

So simple, yet so brilliant. Logic Express, you continue to astound me with your seemingly endless capabilities.

Without further preface, I am serving up an aural slice of my latrine and kitchen: a shaver, a nose-hair trimmer, a faucet, a toaster timer and bell, and yes, the porcelain throne all resonate in symphony for your listening pleasure.

I trust that you will find the result fascinating and perhaps a touch grotesque. Bon Appetit!

Grounded

The past couple of days have given me a sense of growing hope that the Redline Project is starting to find a coherent direction for its recorded product. I am a person who emotes deeply and wrestles regularly with life's answerless questions, often to no avail. It is fitting that the music on the final recording will reflect these personality facets, and I am excited that they are starting to reveal themselves even in these early scratch recordings.

The feedback I have received regarding 'Slips Away' and 'Sing Silently' has been overwhelmingly positive. If you did take the time to write, please accept my sincere thanks. This project, music listeners, is for you. The final recording must speak to its audience, or it will cease to have one.

As encouraging as the past week's worth of songwriting, recording, and blogging all have been, I must confess that it all has me feeling a little heavy, and I am imagining that my readers are feeling the same. So permit me today to lighten it up a bit with a quick anecdote from the trenches of Studio Redline and a scratch recording of some electronica experimentation.

Early last month, I waxed melancholic about the endless frustrations of online message boards. Though the loathing generally continues, I am pleased to inform that I found an actual solution to one of the persisting problems plaguing my recording setup.

Here's how it all went down:

Each time I plug up my acoustic-electric Guild F4-CE or the Guild Starfire electric guitar on loan from a friend, I experience a horrid melange of buzzes, pops, static, and clown nose honks. After delving through stacks of digital drivel, I happen on a post with an intriguing do-it-yourself fix. The poster's idea smacked of the home repairs I have accomplished with duct tape in one hand and a caulk gun in the other. Perfect; worth a shot.

Simply strip a bit of plastic off the top and bottom of a long wire. Wrap one end around the exposed metal where the guitar cord meets the mixer and run the other down to the chassis of the computer. Buzzing problem solved.

Initially false. The cacophony continues. But I make an important observation: when I unwind the wire from the base of my desktop tower, the buzzing disappears. Why? Because I am touching the exposed copper threads. Apparently I am a grounded individual.

Fingers on wire equals no crazy hum or nightmare buzz. But I need both hands to play either guitar. I twirl my scraggly soul patch as I ponder my options.

Eureka! One simple maneuver later, I am adding acoustic and electric guitar tracks to the evening's musical experiment. Thank you, random message board poster. You have made my night.

So as you listen to today's scratch recording, you can thank my left gluteal muscle for the noise-free guitar lines. Yes, that's correct: I stuck that wire right down my pants and sat on it.

Mission accomplished.

Thumping in the Rain

Sunday afternoons offer the idyllic backdrop for snoozes, and the gray blanket of rain sputtering from Atlanta's cloudy heavens sings a lullaby. But the studio wafts the aroma of that new keyboard smell in my direction, and it is going to win the day.

What might be the perfect genre of music to compose and record on this bleak January weekend? When all I want to do is drift off to dreamland, there are no sounds I crave more than the thump and bump of a solid club track.

Not even remotely true. The quiet storm outside most likely finds me huddled under a blanket cradling a mug of green tea and spinning discs by the likes of Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Norah Jones, Amos Lee, Damien Rice... Bonus points if the tracks lull me into a light sleep.

I am an acoustic instrumentalist who has never touched a piece of digital gear. So why trance music today, or even at all? Among several other chotchkies in my closet of surprises, I am enamored by the sounds and textures of club music; so much in fact that when I made an initial move towards a musical renaissance six months ago, I bought myself two second-hand turntables, a mixer, and a pile of used vinyl. Visions of Sugar Plum Fairies clad in Dolce Gabanna moonwalked through my head as I contemplated a switcheroo from the common man to DJ Redline.

Didn't work. I was pretty terrible. The remnants of that misadventure sat in a tangle of wires on the living room floor until three days ago when a pimply high school junior handed me $210 for the lot.

There is a confession in all of this: I love dance music and I love to dance, though I know virtually nothing about either one. You are invited to have a gander at my first experiment with creating this sort of sound. This is my second scratch recording to emerge from the Logic Express engine, and I am pleased to report that the software did not stump me for hours on end as it did the first time.

Here are some specs:
Total Composing/Recording Time: 2 Hours
Software: Logic Express 8
Midi Input: M-Audio KeyRig 49
Audio Interface: Alesis MultiMix12 Firewire
Microphone: Audio Technica AT4033a

Where's Waldo?
Though it is not instantly obvious, I actually sing in this scratch recording. Can you pick it out the textures?

Vocabulary

With two weeks under the belt and 50 remaining to achieve the goals of the Redline Project, a brief overview of my recently expanded vocabulary is in order.

Automation:

What I thought it was:
Setting the old percolator to boil the coffee beans at 7:30 AM.

What it is:
A mixing process that remembers the sliding motion of the faders and repeats the movements on playback. (I used an automation function to make a fade-out at the end of today's scratch recording.)

Latency:

What I thought it was:
The uncanny ability my wife has to be four minutes tardy to just about anything.

What it is:
A measure of time delay experienced in a system. (Strike a note on the keyboard and you hear it a split second later than you had hoped.)

Delay:

What I thought it was:
The symptomatic phenomenon a husband experiences when his wife suffers from chronic latency

What it is:
An effect that adds measured echo to a sound or set of sounds. (A little delay went a long way to spruce up the keyboard and mouse tracks in scratch recording #1)

DAW:

What I thought it was:
An expression of frustration, nicely accompanied by the pounding of fists on a desk or other nearby solid object.

What it is:
Stands for Digital Audio Workstation. (It's a fancy name for music software.)

USB Keyboard Purchased at a Local Pawn Shop:

What I thought it was:
A piece of equipment that is identical in every way to a unit with the same model number acquired elsewhere.

What it is:
A worthless hunk of doo that causes headaches and emotional trauma and accomplishes nothing of its intended purpose. (I am grateful that this particular Pawn Mart, sleazy as it may be, agreed to accept a return within 24 hours.)

USB Keyboard Purchased at Guitar Center:

What I thought it was:
A piece of equipment that is twice as expensive as it should be that can also be acquired at a local pawn shop for a fraction of the cost.

What it is:
A piece of equipment that more or less works right out of the box.

Plug and Play

What I thought it was:
A concept describing the process of a user stringing a wire between a computer and a peripheral device and instantly having the ability to commence using said device.

What it is:
A marketing scheme that lures innocent consumers into a purchase resulting in three hours worth of reading mice type in a flimsy user manual and listening to Vivaldi's Four Seasons pipe through one's cell phone earbud as a soothing voice expresses thankfulness over and again for 'your patience as all operators are currently assisting other customers.'

There you have it: two weeks of lessons learned. Below is another scratch recording - the first result of my adventures in Logic Express. I composed and recorded the song in the course of three hours, and I have to admit I was a little impressed. But the balloon quickly popped when it took another four to figure out how to export an audio file with decent sound levels. Blast.

The significance of this recording is not found in the meaning of the words or the complexity of the music. All of its components were kept simple and lighthearted in order to focus on the true goal of this particular effort: the creation of my first recorded song structure.

And yes, much of what you hear was inputted on an M-Audio KeyRig 49 acquired at Guitar Center around 7:45 PM last night.

Sources of Inspiration

The Redline Project forays deeper each day into a somewhat schizophrenic existence. On the one hand, I have received great connections from friends, distant relatives, and even a few complete strangers who all seem to have a better handle on social networking than I ever will. The arsenal of gear strewn around Studio Redline is starting to resemble a hobby rig that just may be good enough to lay down a decent record. Most exciting of all, the blog is receiving about 50 hits a day, which is starting to lay a good foundation from which the goals of the Redline Project can be accomplished.

There is another hand that takes the form of a few major question marks. What is this whole thing other than a narcissistic romp in the sandbox of my imagination? Is there any point to all the writing, recording, or spending? Without music as an active presence in my life, I feel deflated and and a little lost, while the pursuit of music has me wondering if I am motivated by selfish ambition and vanity.

I do not have any answers, but I have been experiencing deep satisfaction, even a sense of joy, since these explorations commenced. Music is my native tongue, and rubbing my feet on its doormat once again reminds me that I am once again home.

After church today, a few friends went out for bahn mi (delicious Vietnamese sandwiches of roasted pork, chicken, or other meats, and a spicy array of fresh vegetables). My buddy Ian, who tutors youth living in one of the apartment complexes in our city, brought Leslie along, a spunky preteen from his neighborhood.  The restaurant was mobbed and each opening of the door brought a blustery chill into the tiny space. Leslie is skin, bone, and hoodie sweatshirt, and she was clearly freezing. "I can't wait to go home and put my hands and feet into a pot of boiled water," she announced.

I already knew a few eye-opening facts about Leslie's home life, but I learned today that her family has no gas contract, and therefore has no hot water. A shower is not an option for Leslie right now, and I am concerned that enough warmth in this period of record-breaking freeze may also be unavailable to her.

Leslie, with all of the challenges she faces, has a sparkly smile and a far better attitude than most of us in the spoiled brat club. She is the inspiration for the scratch recording I have posted below. The glasses in the picture above are the only instrument you will hear, and my pale voice is the second sound source. The music starts thin and builds; if you have the time and patience, give it a listen to the end.

First Scratch Recording

The house is frigid and there is no hot water in the boiler. Nothing is broken, but I had to flip the switches to get some semblance of quiet in the basement gone makeshift studio. I stopped by my buddy Peter's house this morning to pick up an Audio Technica AT4033a that has been sitting in his closet for a few years. Making sounds into the stealth-black diaphragm, my voice snaking through the tangle of wires into my headphones, brings an instant, gratifying sense that the Redline Project may actually find its way off of the ground someday.

Even with the boiler room shut down on this record-cold Atlanta morning, I am suddenly cognizant of a complex cacophony of creaks, shakes, and rattles that emanate from the foundation of my 1971 split-level. Excitment with a twist of determination was the cocktail of the hour, and after a morning's worth of clicking around GarageBand, I am pleased to announce that my very first scratch recording, with its many imperfections, is ready to be heard.

My purpose of producing scratch recordings is like jotting reflections of life into a journal. What you are able to hear below is in no way intended to be a part of the final product. It is what will be the first of many explorations, delving into the world of audio recording with little regard for polish or excellence. I am trying to find my voice, groping around the possibilities for anything even remotely coherent.

A blog is a voice, placed online through a series of keystrokes and mouse-clicks. I could not thing of a better way to kick off my explorations than to use only the sounds of my mouse, keyboard, and voice to build this first scratch track.

So with much humility and nervousness, I welcome you to listen to Redline 001.

The Importance of Song

From my first days sitting at a piano, with my kindergarten-sized legs swinging around unable to reach the pedals, I have always been moved by the sounds of the different instruments. As this fascination developed into a love, I became continually more serious about studying instrumental music. Matter of fact, I did not stop until I had a bachelors degree hanging on the wall and a masters degree tied in a neat roll on the counter.

A quick tangent and a true story worth telling: It was not more than a few days after I received my official masters degree from Fedex that I left the house to run a brief errand. When I returned 20 minutes later, I found a guilty-looking beagle, my pooch Daisy, slunk across her pillow. When she wouldn't look me in the eye, I knew it was time to survey the damage. Sure enough, I found what remained of my diploma on the floor. Daisy had consumed most of it, including the official school seal and the presidential signatures. Pffft.

For every moment I am working on these posts or researching musical gear, I am finding at least five more to contemplate my approach to creating an album of music.

The main problem: I can't sing. Not an underestimation, I know how I want the emanations of my mouth to sound, but my vocal chords refuse to cooperate. My voice is wispy and feeble, and hardly ever squarely on pitch. Hence the instrumental bent I suppose. It only follows that I have no experience writing lyrics or composing song structures.

A quick jostle through the radio dial reveals the truth anyone could have guessed: music that connects with most people has lyrics, tells a story, is sung.

Big questions loom. As I begin to put together an approach to the product of this project, will I somehow include singing and songwriting? Stick with my instrumental comfort zone? Some combination of the two? And even larger, what is the story I am trying to tell here? What is the picture I am trying to paint?

Just for giggles I sat with the blinking cursor yesterday and scribbled out a few verses. Instead of my custom of being embarrassed, I am going to make a practice of putting my scratches out there for everyone to dissect. If there are any poets or lyricists out there, feel free to dig your nails in.

Who are you? Lost around the world.

Without a face. Without a trace.

A lonely space echoes back the silence.

Years slip by without a word.

Lost into the past.

Just dial tone on the telephone.

The mailbox rattles in the wind.

Come home. Who are you?

On a lighter and much more trendy note, the Redline Project is on Facebook and Twitter now.

Facebook: The Redline Project

Twitter: @RedlineProject

Loose Schedule

I awoke several times last night thinking about the Redline Project. A year seems like a long stretch, but the time will slip away if there are not some basic deadlines for the various parts of the project. An arbitrary stab:

1) All funds acquired by January 31, 2010.
2) All equipment acquired by February 28, 2010.
3) Basic album ideas and audio sketches completed by May 15, 2010.
4) Recording completed by September 30, 2010.
5) Recording released and promoted by October 31, 2010.
6) 10,000 downloads of recording by December 31, 2010.

Again, simple and impossible all at once. Pure excitement and the fear of failure hold hands, and all I can do is try to make this happen.

The Idea

I am a musician. This is admittedly a bold statement because I have not played a gig in over three years, I am not in any sort of band or ensemble, and I have never been in a studio - not even as a sideman.

So what gives me the right to pin such a title to my lapel? To be honest, I'm not sure if I can in good conscience accept the honor of it. Or at least not yet.

I may have years of experience playing both piano and drums. I may have both a bachelors and masters degree in the field. I may have a good ear and natural ability with composing and arranging music. But the somewhat sad and all-too-honest truth is that I am completely average - nothing more, and nothing less.

Has there ever been a musician who hasn't daydreamed about excelling in their field? Performing in amphitheaters to a sea of followers? Releasing the record that pulses through the earbuds of iPods across the nation? A reality any artist must face: there are millions gazing at the celestial beings, but only a few shooting stars. Most end up with shreds of dreams and workaday posts in gray cubicles.

Like most recipients of masters degrees in music, I failed to launch any sort of career in or related to music. So I hung up my instruments and slowly pieced together a career in graphic design. Working first in an office for three years, I steadily became adept enough in this new vocation to build a freelance work base. I now sit in my basement daily, clicking away on my Mac, producing disposable artwork for nonprofit organizations that is, familiarly, neither awesome nor terrible.

I have always felt this drive, and as years come between me and the days of actively pursuing music, a sadness has crept in. I ignored it for a while, but the sense of loss has only grown with each passing month, and I have finally sifted through the lament to see what the trouble really is.

It is not money I am after, and it is certainly not fame. I believe that music resides in me and has been trying to bust through my ribs for decades. To this point my music has been the proverbial tree that falls in the middle of a thick wood. Without a witness, the whole stunning thing comes and goes without so much as a raised eyebrow.

Well, I have had enough of that. It is time to let the music out. Time to create something... put it out there in all its glory, with all its faults. It is the second day of the new year, and at this time next year, I am questing to release a digital album of my music, striving to have 10,000 people download and listen to it, aiming to spend only $1000 to do it.

There it is: a set of goals that sound simple enough and seem all but impossible. Please join me for the adventure.