Handcrafted Music. No AI.

Everything I record is hand-built, arranged and recorded meticulously, and a reflection of 30+ years of studying and exploring music composition. As for my formal education, I spent two summers studying music composition at the CalArts summer program for high school students. Then I earned a B. A. in Music Composition from UC Santa Barbara, College of Creative Studies.

The most advanced tech I use is probably the “smart” drum machines, which have features that make programming drum tracks easier. These smart drum machines existed many years before any AI showed up on the scene in 2022. And even these smart drum machines require careful attention to detail and fine-tuning as I craft a drum track. I don’t always use these smarter drum machines and I often use simpler ones that require building drum tracks from the ground up. I don’t use autotune on my vocals.

A Little Bit of Musical Biographical Background

I started out my musical life on trumpet, electric guitar, classical guitar, and bass guitar in grade school. In high school I learned jazz bass and jazz guitar and began learning to sing as well. In college I began learning the basics of piano.

Besides enjoying classical guitar and jazz, throughout the 1990s I listened heavily to alternative rock. As the decades in the 2000s have progressed, I’ve added a lot of African and Asian world music influences as well as lots of film score-style EDM. (I explain more about those influences on the About page.)

Some more notes on my writing and recording process

For many of the songs released I’ve written out notation for each instrument part using the music notation software Sibelius.

For all music released between 2022 and 2025, I used GarageBand on my iPhone and a cheap microphone that was housed inside a pair of bluetooth headphones. The headphones cost around $50-$70 or so, but when I positioned the headphones properly, their little microphone (used for controlling music playlists by voice commands, I think) captured a surprisingly good sound. I would find a decent acoustic space — usually in my car or the bedroom or basement of the house where we were living at the time — then position the headphones close to my mouth with a cord running from the headphones to the recording app in my iPhone, and then sing.

My Year-Long Break (and One of the Reasons I Took It)

I took a year-long hiatus from writing and recording new music beginning 10/24/24. That break lasted until 10/31/25. I had worked on and released so much music between 2022 and 2024 that I just needed a long break from it. During those busy recording years of 2022 and 2024, I would typically use my lunch breaks, week nights, and weekends to record. It was fun but quite a lot of work. It was time to stop for awhile.

I used part of the break in 2025 to find most of my old songs from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, remaster all of them, and re-release them on digital music platforms. Many of them had never been released digitally before. That was a lot of fun to re-discover them — maybe laugh at myself for some of the cringier moments — and then release them with a better mastering quality.

My New Recording Set-Up for 2026 and Going Forward

For all music released in 2026 and going forward, I have began using Logic Pro on Apple and a Neumann TLM 103 microphone running through a small Focusrite audio interface for vocal recording. (I used a similar setup of software and gear for my music releases in the 2010s. It has been fun to go back to that more advanced studio set-up.) For 2026 releases and going forward, I have also began using the Neumann to record bass guitar parts played through a Fender bass amp and electric guitar parts played through a small Marshall amp.

I have no plans to ever use AI to make music.