Welcome to my blog. This has been a slow dawning as I have increasingly wanted to find ways to share what I have learned and write about what interests me.

About Me

For those that don’t know my background, I am a musician and music-maker, starting my musical life as a cellist and chorister and becoming an electronic act who toured the world for nearly 20 years. I stopped touring as a club act in 2018ish and increasingly worked on music for TV and film, and on composition work that falls outside of the mainstream. This has involved working with other musicians and also included making my own instruments and other acoustic sound sources. I am also an associate artist with Cryptic, an arts organisation in Glasgow.

In the last few years, I increasingly began to focus on teaching, from outreach programs and group projects to one-to-one lessons. It is this experience that inspired me to begin writing down my thoughts on music, creativity, and technique, and to find ways to share them.

I originally wrote it as a book, but realised I could make it more dynamic and engaging if I used some of the technologies now available to us, and included tutorials, video, and a new website. Of course, I couldn’t make it all at once, so the site will be added to constantly as I create new content.

I am always happy to hear what would be most useful so feel free to make requests in the comments or via the contact form.

Who is It For

The primary focus of this website is to share information and to help those who are seeking a creative outlet in music, but I could also see a space to talk about creativity as a whole, and how it crosses boundaries of physical, mental and spiritual life. Because my background and experience are varied, I tend to think of the various aspects of writing, composing and producing as overlapping disciplines. The majority of my experience is in electronic music, so I will tend to use this for my examples in the majority of cases, but this balance is gradually shifting as I work increasingly in other areas of music. In terms of composition I am still very much in the learning phase, whilst in electronic production I have a more confident grasp of my subject, and it is important that I speak from experience and not simply theory. Otherwise you could just ask ChatGPT.

My interests are pretty varied, so while the focus of this site is creativity and music creation, I will allow myself a certain freedom to dive into foreign waters sometimes, and provide links and context for people who want to likewise investigate new directions.

Mental Health and Creativity

One of the things that really became increasingly clear to me in the last 5 years is just how many people are struggling with mental health, and the negative impacts of our society. Music making and creativity can help in dealing positively with these pressures, and has been a long term subject of interest, so this is an additional aspect of this site.

Patreon Support

There is also a Patreon account for those who would like to benefit from a range of more targeted and individual services and who would like to help support the rest of the free content for others. For patrons there will also be the option of requesting personal music feedback, technical guidance and track breakdowns for any of my previously-released music, and a number of other benefits and downloads. I most likely won’t have all the tiers and facets of Patreon set up by the time this site goes live, as there is simply too much to do, but I will open it anyway and keep people posted on its progress.

Contact

There is a contact form at the bottom of this page if you have any direct questions or suggestions.

So, let’s begin…