Initially, I stopped posting because my workload was too large. I had two musicals to prepare, a few piano students, plenty of difficult music for the women’s acapella group, and prepared my upcoming releases with Joe Roller, some of which came out in 2020 with still more to come. I kept my blogging output consistent through writing posts in groups of four or five in advance, saving them to my desktop, and posting them according to my alternating Monday schedule.

With dozens of rehearsal recordings to prepare and hundreds of pages of scores to learn, writing simply wasn’t a priority. I keep my turnaround time for clients and projects as fast as possible, and that fast turnaround time comes with some sacrifices. My blog isn’t a client or a paying project, so it just didn’t make sense to prioritize it. I never used it as a sales tool or part of some SEO strategy because I didn’t want to confine myself too much on what I wrote about or how I wrote it. Somehow, I still retained my two thousand readers (now we’re up to four thousand!) but it sat neglected like a mediocre casserole at a barbeque.

In March 2020, my world ended, and I suddenly had more time to write. I didn’t. The sudden loss of opportunities I worked very hard for was difficult on me. I injured my foot on a run after the city closed the climbing gym and got plantar fasciitis. Walking from one end of my room to the other end was extremely painful, so I spent most days working on music and most nights playing Euro or American Truck Simulator. After my plantar fasciitis healed and it wasn’t a workout to walk from my room to the mailbox, Colorado had historic wildfires that polluted the air to the point breathing outside was the same as smoking an entire pack of cigarettes.

While I never stopped reading or composing music, my writing stopped. This was the second time I burned out writing. The first was a year ago, in 2019, after I completed my honors thesis for the University of Colorado Denver. My professor was abusive, so opening up Word or Outlook brought up bad memories. In fact, I wrote some of the first blog posts in Notepad just so I wouldn’t have to stare at the Word interface, and I wouldn’t have to “see” her comments about how I wrote at a freshman level and the UCD English department failed to teach me anything.

Yet, unlike the last period, I can’t put my finger on why exactly I stopped writing in prose. I continued to write music, and this might be one of the most prolific points of my career. I finished up several releases last year, I completed my first two major transcriptions of Buxtehude and Bach and prepared their final editions for publication, I started a new secret transcription project, I recorded an easy listening piano album, I wrote twelve solo piano waltzes, and I recorded dozens of practice tracks for vocal students and my colleagues. This is on top of the nine commercially available Joe Roller releases that float around the internet. I never struggled with writing music, as I am primarily a musician, and sometimes writing in English feels less natural than composing a melody, but that is a whole other story.

Despite these accomplishments, I never wet my digital quill. Part of the reason is that I started reading more blogs, and I hated the directions other bloggers took with their writing. I didn’t like the LinkedIn Philosopher, who is a young man my age with business expertise that he learned from Instagram University condescending to me as if he started the next Microsoft. Then there’s Blue Hair Suzy who publishes her controversial Hot Takes, who researched her incredibly banal opinion with the same CNN, Fox News, or NPR articles everyone else reads. Let’s not forget SEO Mike, who could write an interesting blog, but instead insults the English language by writing blog posts as if they were poorly thought out computer code, with choppy ideas and first-grade language centered around a group of keywords a marketing team came up with that a Google robot enjoys “reading,” and leaves a reader like me mildly annoyed. Oh, and there’s Obvious Alice, who read a blog post about the “Top 10 Things to Write On Your Blog,” and writes the same posts everyone else does.

I didn’t want to make my blog like any of theirs. Writing about the music business felt a bit duplicitous, as I am not very successful or important in the grand scheme of it. I don’t spend enough time researching political issues to develop interesting or nuanced opinions like Bob Woodward or Radio War Nerd do. I don’t write for SEO, and ironically, since people search with natural language, my blog posts do far better than most people who treat SEO as black magic. I also don’t want to write about the same things everyone else does. There is not point to it, and I might as well unpublish my posts.

So, what will I do? I want to focus my blog on three areas. The first content series will be “Lend Me Your Ear.” I will take a recording I like and talk about what I find interesting about it. The second will be “Linear Notes,” where I will give a detailed description of how a track came about, the personal things behind it, and some interesting production trick I used. I also want to write more personal essays, as those tend to be more interesting than political philosophies or business tips. I also have a series coming up called “Swan Songs,” where I will write about the last normal days I had before the pandemic uprooted everything.

I hope you enjoy it, and I will post twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays from now on.

The post Blog Announcement appeared first on Joe Roller.

Seven years ago, I was at a crossroads in my life. The band I was apart of in high school was over. I had an impressive resume, but I didn’t get into the music schools I wanted to because of my grades. Apparently, grades are, in fact, more important than your playing or portfolio.

I hope that, you, the reader, understand how hard I worked to do well in college after doing poorly in high school and that even if you’re rejected by idiots like I was, there is nothing that will ever stop you from accomplishing what you want. What some letter says written by some anonymous jerk who never met you doesn’t have anything to do with the truth. It never has and never will. I was never the type to let other people dictate what I can and cannot do in my life and I hope I inspire you and remind you that you can strive for the life you deserve no matter what.

Now that’s out of the way, I thought it was time for a change. I wanted new musical experiences and so I went to the same place everyone else goes when you want something new: Craigslist. I sent tons of emails and eventually got a badly formatted, all lowercase, was-he-drunk-when-he-wrote-this kind of email along the lines of “sounds legit dude come over tomorrow in stapleton [address] at 4:30 good to hear your tunes bro [cellphone number].”

I drove my prehistoric, no-AC ’91 Honda in a dry heat in rush hour an hour away from my parents’ house to Stapleton. It was so freaking hot when I finally got there I was covered in sweat and utterly exhausted.

Getting to Stapleton that first time was one of the times in my life I truly felt afraid. I was nervous about the audition, sure. Like everyone else, I also get a little anxious any time I have to meet someone new, and I had no idea what I was about to get into since the email didn’t have much in the way of specifics. That’s not even half of what I was afraid of, though.

The area at the time was mostly halfway houses and warehouses that all looked the same. All the traffic around me was semi-trucks going extremely fast around tight corners, with guys that had neck tattoos screaming at my Honda that barely had enough power to haul my keyboard amp and me. I parked to try to call the dude I was supposed to meet. My phone overheated due to the sauna on wheels I drove, and I just had to wait it out in the shade for a little while. A few of the many hostile drug addicts walking around the neighborhood surrounded my car like vultures and caught a glimpse of the keyboard amp and knew that there was something valuable in there. A few of them started yelling things to get my attention, so they had an excuse to come see me.

It didn’t take much for me to drive around the block. I had to make a call, and you know, I do deserver an Oscar for my brilliant acting job that covered up how nervous I was I’ll never forget the first time I saw the drummer on that day out of hell. Finding him was such a relief. I felt like the Jews finding water in the desert for the first time.

I rolled up to another warehouse to find him standing near a door stenciled “FIRE EX IT.” He was a dude with a violet wook trucker hat covered in pins, stunning brown eyes, curly earrings, goatee, graffiti tee shirt, a half-whiskey half-coke Polar Pop, and held a pot pipe and smoked his cigarette at the same time. I immediately thought “well, what did you really expect from a Craigslist ad that said ‘420 friendly,’ Joe,” and went up to meet him.

He lead me to our little rehearsal room. God, I miss that room. We rehearsed in a very small room with black, cloth walls lit with faux candles. The air conditioning didn’t work and it reeked of body odor, palo santo, weed, and beer. We played for four, five, even six hours at a time in that space. That room was part of one of the craziest, most fun periods of my life.

That first day, we played for two hours without talking. He said, “good work, come back next week.” I replied, “sure thing,” loaded up, and drove another hour back home. We said all of ten words over two conversations that first day. When you have a real musical connection, you don’t need to talk that much.

“Sixish” captures the four-hour jams we had in that little room. I created a track that captured the simple, elegant melodies our guitarist played, the bassline our awesome bassist laid down, and of course the amazing drumming I was lucky enough to hear. I wanted most of all to capture the vibe of what it was like to play and jam out for hours and hours and hours and distill it to some of our finest moments together.

Buy “Sixish” on Bandcamp

Buy/Stream “Sixish” on Apple Music

Buy/Stream “Sixish” on Google Play

Stream “Sixish” on Spotify

Stream “Sixish” on Deezer

Buy/Stream “Sixish” on Amazon

Buy/Stream “Sixish” on Amazon

Go back to the “Sixish” Release Page

Be the first to know when a new track comes out!

The post “Sixish” Linear Notes appeared first on Joe Roller.

Yes, it’s that easy to get started. No, there aren’t some super-secret barriers I’m hiding. If you can point and click, and can navigate your computer’s filesystem, you already won half the battle.

Don’t feel intimidated if it’s something you always wanted to try. Are you waiting for a sign to start? Well, this is it. Let’s talk about what I mean in some more detail.

1) Have the Right Attitude

Focus on the big ideas, not the details. I guarantee that 99.99% of what people discuss in forums is pointless. Internet strangers are sneaky devils. While most intend well, they also don’t know what they’re doing, they aren’t accountable for wasting your time, and they won’t give your time back to you after they took it.

Internet strangers focus too much on the details. You didn’t get into production to debate compressor circuit types with people who never worked in studios. Audiences don’t care whether the new version of Ableton is better than the old one. You don’t now, and you shouldn’t down the road. Focus on the music. Focus on the magic a beautiful piece of music brings to your life.

Think about these questions instead. What made you want to make music? Are you inspired by an artist? Do you want to see how the magic is made in the studio? Do you have a passion for technology? Do you have a passion for doing something new?

Or are you inspired by life itself? Do you have experiences that you want to channel into the music you made? Do you want to transport people to another place, or do you want to make the present moment better?

What is the role of music in your life?

What specific moments in a piece of music you like make you feel a certain way? Why?

How is music made? Is music a reflection of the artist? Or, does the artist channel music from somewhere else? How do you know? Are there any people who wrote about this?

There aren’t answers to these questions. But, keep these ideas in mind. My answers change, but the questions stay the same. Maybe the question has more truth than the answer. Anyways, let’s go on to tame everyone’s biggest enemy: time.

2) Have some time

One of the biggest myths about being a musician is that you have to be a loser to do it. You don’t have to make sacrifices to produce music. It turns out you can still see your friends, game, or whatever else and still have time to make music. It’s really easy to find time to produce.

I’ll show you just how easy it is to find time to produce. Are you into gaming four hours a night? Start an hour later after you produced for an hour. Your friends won’t mind. Go to the gym three times a week? Great, produce on a night you set aside rest. Have a fling you want to keep around on Fridays and Saturdays? There’s always Sunday afternoon.

You could even produce just once a week for an hour or two. That’s better than nothing. Two hours every Saturday adds up to eight hours in a month—eight hours you didn’t spend before! That’s more time than most people ever spend in their lives making music.

Don’t let yourself get seduced by a Faustian bargain. Yes, people who only make music are losers. If you only spend your life doing one thing, that’s a horrible life to live. The art you make will suffer because it’s not informed by the richness that other disciplines, and life, provide. Musicians without other interests make boring music.

While we’re on the subject of time, give yourself a while to refine your skills. It’s ok to take a while to make your first complete track, even if it’s thirty seconds. Take some time to study music itself with guitar or piano lessons so you know how to write chords. Even if it takes you a year to make your first track, at least that’s one more track than you had before.

Don’t be hard on yourself. Your first tracks will be very bad and that’s ok. Keep in mind that someone with at least ten years of experience probably made the tracks you like, even if they’re young. Some guys start at 10; when they hit 20 they’re incredible musicians.

Don’t worry about it. If you were a writer, you wouldn’t publish your first-grade report on “How I spEnt summr.” Why would you publish the first track you made?

3) Get a decent computer

Chances are your computer is already good enough to run production software. If you have at least four cores, 8 GB of RAM, and 70 GB or so of free space you’re good to go.

Make sure you have a Mac or a Windows machine. Chromebooks and Linux won’t ever make the cut.

You’ll probably need a machine produced within the last three years. Don’t break the bank getting a new computer. You can always upgrade down the road.

4) The Right Software

Software is one of those details that people love to talk about which doesn’t matter as much as people pretend it does. What matters the most is that is you use something you like. People make all kinds of subjective judgements on music software they trick you with. Use whatever you want.

There aren’t many options for production software right now. Ableton, FL Studio, Cubase, Logic Pro, Studio One, Sony Acid Pro, and Pro Tools all will give you the result you need.

What do I use? Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter for you. Go and find something you like to use by downloading trials and following along with the tutorials the developers included for you. That’s the only way you’ll learn.

Go get started!

The post Yes, You Can Produce: Starting from Nothing appeared first on Joe Roller.