(Update: I released a second album, which you can find more information about here.)
For the last few decades, I have been making up songs on the piano as a hobby (yes, it was mostly self-taught). Genre-wise I would say my songs are a mix of new-age, classical, and jazz (with David Benoit and Debussy being two influences). I think you may also hear some hints of Japanese music, especially anime music which I have practiced before. Just a few years ago I started recording and putting these songs online on places such as YouTube. A few months ago I even started a new podcast where I uploaded a new piano song every few days.
However, I realized that rather than distributing my songs as a podcast, it would be better for me to distribute them in the form of music, as a regular artist would. This is especially true for sites like Spotify where there are differences between the two types of media.
After doing some searching, I found a distributor to help me get my song files out onto places like Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music in the form of a proper music album. While it took a few weeks for the process, my first album is finally on a few online services as of now.
I have chosen the name “If Pianos Could”, with the underlying theme that all songs will have piano in some form. The first album, “Opening Moves” contains a few hand-picked inspirational compositions that I made in the last few months, which you can think of like stream-of-consciousness in the music domain. For the most part these are unedited except for minor stuff like trimming the beginning, ending, and reducing noise. All songs were recorded on my Yamaha G2 baby grand piano. You can think of this sort of like a live album since there wasn’t a huge amount of production done. (In case you are curious, the name was influenced from a the name of the David Benoit song “If I could Reach Rainbows” and a quote from Tori Amos along the lines of “I guess you go too far when pianos try to be guitars”.)
For future albums I plan on continuing to put out more of these inspirational compositions (where I basically make up the song on the spot as my feelings take me), but I want to also start doing more proper compositions where I script everything in advance and do heavier editing. I also have plans to add other instruments, like perhaps harp, recorder, and flute, and also background sounds and other interesting stuff.
Apple Music: [The album isn’t online on Apple music yet, it may take another couple of weeks]
I’m already working on my 2nd album and expect to publish it within a month. I also have some ideas about making a Youtube channel where I play covers and analyze the structure of piano songs, let me know in the comments if that is something you might like.
I’m always interested in feedback about my music. Please email me at ifpianoscould [at] gmail.com with any feedback.
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