Tag: instrumental music

SubscribeStar Saturday: Spooky Season III Preview

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yours portly is knee-deep in composing my next album, Spooky Season III.  As of right now, I’ve completed seven of around ten or eleven planned tracks, and it’s shaping up to be much longer than my other releases.  In fact, I’ve already run out of space on Bandcamp for “extras” for the album.  Those “extras” are things like artwork, PDF scores, and videos, and it’s that last category that is taking up a great deal of space.

So I thought I’d give subscribers a bit of a preview of some of the material I’ve been writing.

Don’t worry, my freebie readers:  I’m going to share a piece with you, too, and note that all of these videos will be up on YouTube in October (so subscribe—it’s free!—to my YouTube channel and ring the bell if you want to get notified when those pop in a few weeks).

Here is the first piece I composed for the album, “Dancing in the Graveyard”; I composed it between 3-4 September 2024, according to my notes and information on Noteflight:

“Dancing in the Graveyard” is a playful oboe and bassoon with option tambora accompaniment. It’s a lively waltz in concert D minor.

I’m really loving composing this album, and I enjoy all of the tracks—and I hope you will, too!—but I’m keen to share some of my personal favorites.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

White Boy Summer Out Today!

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Yours portly keeps churning out the hits, and I’m pleased to announce my seventh album this year, White Boy Summer.

White Boy Summer is a collection of ten summertime jams spanning multiple genres of instrumental music.  The title track is a driving retro rocker reminiscent of Super Nintendo side-scrollers, and is perfect for jamming to on the open road.  I also rewrote it as a chorale for the album’s finale, “White Boy Summa (Theologica),” a piece for brass trio.

This album heavily favors trombone, and the three major trombone pieces emphasize the chill nature of summertime:  “Mellow,” “Lazy River,” and “Summer Vibes.”

“The Sea Crab” is the most experimental piece; it’s a musical interpretation of an unpublished poem of the same name by Liza Libes.

And, despite the title, White Boy Summer is for all people of all races—and both genders.

You can pick it up on Bandcamp for $7.  I’ll be posting links to the album on other streaming platforms in the comments.

Rock on!

—TPP

P.S.—Here are a couple of the tracks that have already been uploaded to YouTube:

Phone it in Friday XL: YouTube Roundup II

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June is nearly over, and July starts tomorrow.  I’ll be hitting the road for a week in Indianapolis to visit my older brother, which means I’ll probably get another poorly-selling travel book out of the deal—maybe something like Midwestern Musings, Washingtonian Woes.  Of course, I need to finish my series on the wild, stressful trip to Washington, D.C., from this March.  For whatever reason, I just haven’t had it in me to continue writing that saga, even though the best (and, at the time they occurred, the worst) parts are yet to come.

But I digress.  In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, here’s another edition if YouTube Roundup, in which I showcase some of my recent YouTube uploads.  Feel free to follow my YouTube page.  Watch a video, like it, leave a comment—whatever you’d like.  I upload approximately once a week, sometimes more.

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Open Mic Adventures XIV: “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”

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The title of this week’s piece is a bit of a misnomer:  it’s not from an open mic night, but from a morning church service.  There’s also no singing—at least, not from me!  I’m just tickling the ivories.  *Tickle, tickle!*

The piece here is one of my favorite Christmas carols, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”  We did sing it for morning service this past Sunday, 27 November 2022 at my little country church, but I was warming up and having a bit of cheeky fun beforehand.

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