It’s been a while I haven’t written here, and no new music has shown up since 2019. Why? Well, let’s go into some details…
As some of you know, I’m not making music for success, a career or even the money. I’m making music because it gives me pleasure first, and I’m distributing it because I hope it will give pleasure to other people as well. I’m amazed at seeing people Shazam’ing my tracks, and I would never have thought people would play them around the world as they are. And no, it’s not million people playing them, but there have been moments when a bunch of Shazam’s appeared on the radar, for tracks like Northern Desert, The Dog, or See You Again Soon. And I find it frankly amazing, seeing I’m really doing zero promotion for my music. The big question is: who’s playing them, and where? Feel free to contact me if you have any clue, or if you often play some of my tracks at parties, music hearings, or wherever. I’m honestly curious about who, where and why. And it’s not about the money, since I don’t care about that part so much. In fact when anyone plays my music on one of the official sites (Apple, Amazon, Youtube, YouTube Music, Spotify, and a bunch of others I can’t even remember), I earn a cent or a fraction of a cent, so I’m already paid for that, even though it’s close to peanuts. As I said, it doesn’t matter so much to me. I’m not in this for the money. But I’m happy if someone likes and enjoys my creations.
Which brings me to the topic of what I’m currently doing. Thing is, I love to compose music, but it’s only one of my main activities in life, which are mostly focused on computer stuff:
– developing firmware for interesting electronic devices (I’ve been the firmware developer, for more than one year, of a bunch of devices that are currently being installed in all Starbucks stores around Canada, and it gave me a lot of work to handle, trust me)
– coding websites for personal projects
– attempting to write two books: one about the trip my wife, Sapna, and I took on a motorcycle around the Americas (from Vancouver to Buenos Aires) between 2017 and 2019; the other one about a fiction story I’ve had in my head for a very long while (I had started composing a music album based on that story back in 2015 or 2016).
– on top of that, I’m taking care of a nice aquarium with just under a dozen tiny cute fishes,
– Sapna and I also started collecting Funko Pops about our preferred characters: Marvel, DC Comics, Stranger Things, Supernatural and some Disney villains…
– oh, I’m also perfectioning/learning in parallel several languages on DuoLingo (find me there, I’m “PeerGum”, obviously…): besides French (native) and English (fluent), I’m trying to maintain my aquired fluency in Portuguese, while re-learning German (I was fluent), improving my Spanish (advanced level, thanks to solid bases in Portuguese), re-working my very limited knowledge of Chinese, and discovering Italian, Russian, Greek, Arabic and Hindi. Funny thing with languages is, once you start you can’t stop. And that works for programming languages too 🙂
So, overall I am pretty busy. In fact, I’d even say I’m excessively busy, and I’m glad Sapna is quite an independent woman and also has her own hobbies on her side, so we spend a lot of time together, side by side on the couch, doing our own stuff, yet none of us is waiting for the other one to provide him or her excessive attention. And that works perfectly for both of us.
But, back to the topic of music, I’ve not been putting it aside, I promise. In fact I planned to release, last year, a new album called Dark Matters: I’ve composed around 20 tracks for it, of which maybe 12-15 I could consider ready or close to ready. The huge hold-up unfortunately has been technology: since I acquired my Roland FA-07 in 2019, after coming back from the trip, I’ve used it in many compositions, because it has great sounds, but the huge downside compared to how I was working before is, the Roland produces audio that needs to be re-captured by the computer, versus composing using Logic Pro X’s internal instruments that doesn’t require that process – which allowed me to easily compose while traveling in the past.
Dark Matters has a very particular tone, much darker than the previous stuff, and will be a very nice album, that I hope you guys will love as much as I loved composing it. I just need to dedicate a bit more time to finalize the audio capture, sound/instrument level adjustments and final audio generation. Maybe 2021? I’ll do my best, but no promises!
I’m also planning to try and go slightly away from my usual style, and compose something different, possibly more orchestral and slightly more complex, but it’s honestly hard to do and moving away from my playing patterns is always a challenge. We’ll see.
On another note, I’ve decided to embrace being genderfluid/non-binary and a different style of music would be coming from my alter-ego, so I introduce you to Aleena Gum. More to discover in 2021/2022, probably, along with my new look – oh, but you haven’t heard: I’ve been growing my hair!
Oh, I almost forgot. Exclusively on this site, this is a draft non-mastered version of the track I worked on yesterday, to be part of a future album… Hope, you’ll enjoy it!
Talk to you soon, Gummies!
– PG