Happy Holidays. I’m spending a very relaxed few days up in Northern California: Fort Bragg, Mendicino and Guernville/Russian River. Love getting away to this part of California this time of year. In the meantime, I’m anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Complete Composers Collection from EWQL. I’ve been dreaming about adding these amazing sounds to my palette for a long time; can’t wait to get my hands on them. New strings, choirs, and rare instruments from around the world. Doesn’t mean I’m trading in my Native Instruments collection – no way. Love my Kontakt, Massive and Reaktor and the Electric Piano and Organ too!

MTV get ready: I’ve released my first video for the song Flicker; it’s also up on YouTube of course. It was fun to get my hands dirty with After Effects again; it had been a while and I was rusty. I wanted to have more visuals in the video than just me playing the piano, so I weaved in some footage from my trip to Japan and Thailand last year; all those fish are from the water in Phuket. Also, I recently added a photo gallery to my photos page.

Was happy to see on the CDBaby home page the announcement of E.S. Posthumus’s new release. These guys are one of my all time favorites, and a huge inspiration. I’ve always enjoyed the way they bring together diverse musical styles, tones and rhythms, to create expansive and colorful “audio paintings” that are full of surprises. Mixing the “old” classical styles with modern electronic sounds.  I can’t wait to check out the full album. Great work.

I’ve been on CDBaby for a while now, and have already sold some of my CD, A Minor Waltz. It’s been a lot of fun setting it all up, getting my very own barcode, seeing people buy the CD; now, if I can only figure out a way to sell a million of these things, then maybe I can retire and play music all day long!

I think I finally worked out all the kinks in my homemade MP3 player. I built it in Flash with AS 3.0 and I hope to update the visualizer soon with something more cool. I also want to add a custom video player that can sync with the music in some way. In the meantime, please do check it out on my music page.

Today I am releasing my new album, A Minor Waltz. I’ve been working on it for about 6-8 months (maybe longer, I can’t remember when I started). This album is mostly solo piano compositions with some string arrangements, synthesizers and samples in there for fun. The style of this album is more classical, song-driven, as opposed to soundscape, ambient, New Age style. I was inspired by the work of David Nevue (who I saw performed recently in the Bay Area), as well as Yann Tiersen. Please check it out on my Music page.

With help from my favorite web host, Media Temple, and my favorite blogging software, WordPress, I finally launched Shimmersong.com. I’m still finishing up development on my custom MP3 and video player so that I can stream music straight from the Music page. Keep a look out.