August Update

It has been a rather eventful summer to say the least. A couple of days after my last blog post my parents came down to visit. It was a short visit but a great one filled with lots of laughter and food. In other words, a typical family visit :-)

A few days after that I had a chance to write some music for a new reality show about a pest control service. Not sure if I'm allowed to say more than that at this time. I ended up writing and signing some new tracks in a couple of genres that were new for me, classic rock and hip-hop.

A couple of days later I got an opportunity to write some tracks for a new show that recently debuted on TLC called Surprise Homecoming, hosted by Billy Ray Cyrus. The show is about soldiers returning home from war and surprising their loved ones. It was a very quick turnaround time for the new cues as the show was already being edited. I wrote a few cues and I also did some co-writing with a couple dear friends, Lydia Ashton and Cathleen Weinrich, both of whom are amazing musicians. Cathleen and I had two tracks signed and Lydia and I had four tracks signed.


Just as that project was wrapping up I got offered a deal to write some new cues for the entertainment news show Access Hollywood. A few other friends of mine had already been working on this project for a couple of months so I came in late in the game and only had about 12 days to work on the project. I had to provide a group of 10 cues at a time with each group being similar in style and tempo. It seemed like I was able to do around eight cues and then I'd hit a wall trying to come up with the last two. I eventually broke through and finished the "album". I ended up doing three albums for a total of 30 cues during that 12 day stretch. During that time I got asked to write a few more cues for the Homecoming show. I ended up doing another four cues for it, which made for a total of 34 cues in 12 days. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep during those two weeks :-)

As soon as I wrapped up the Access Hollywood project I immediately had to start on a new project for the Dr. Oz show. I only had about four days left before the deadline when I started. Fortunately, this project was a bit smaller, I only had to do six new cues for it but ended up doing a seventh one as a (typical) last minute request came in. I did manage to get everything done on time and then I was ready for a break.

The day after wrapping up that project my wife and I headed up to Ohio to visit her family for a few days. We were looking forward to the trip, thinking that it would be a bit cooler up there than it had been in Nashville. We were wrong. It was worse. Other than the heat wave, we had a great time seeing the family. Even managed to see Captain America while we were there. I loved it and can't wait to see the Avengers movie next year!

The last couple of weeks have been spent mostly on paperwork and organization, as well as writing some new cues for a variety of different TAXI listings ranging from "Scary Underscore" and "Epic War Drums" to "90's Grunge Rock" and "Acoustic Singer-Songwriter" and "Alt Rock" like The Black Keys. It was fun getting to write for such a diverse group of listings. While I'm still awaiting the results on most of these listings, I've already found out that the tracks I did for the Black Keys listing were forwarded. I wish every listing was screened as quickly as that one was (less than six hours after the listing deadline)!

I was going to do an update on my latest batch of placements but I think I'll save that for a couple more days. But I do have one last bit of news before I wrap this entry up. This past Friday night I ended up slicing open the pinky finger on my "fretboard" hand while cutting up a green pepper. Fortunately, it doesn't look like I'm going to need stitches but it will be a couple more days before I'll be able to play guitar with all my fingers. So I took a little time this weekend and gave my web site a bit of a face lift. Nothing major, just re-arranged a few things, changed a few of the graphics, etc... and hopefully made the blog a little bit easier on the eyes to read. Oh, and I also removed the link to my MySpace profile. I haven't deleted it yet, but this is the first step towards that direction. In it's place, I've added a link to my SoundCloud profile, which as of now, is empty, but I'll be adding tracks to it later this week.

That's all for now. I'll be posting another update later this week with some of my recent placements in it. The last couple of months have been really good to me!