October 2023 Bandcamp Friday: Spooky Season II Out TODAY!

Special Note:  I will be donating 10% of all gross sales for TODAY, Friday, 6 October 2023 from my Bandcamp page to the Music program at my little private school.  That includes my new album, Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids, which released today.  It also includes purchases of my full discography (just $20.89) and merchandise.  If I make 50 sales of any kind today, I’ll double the donation.  If I make 100 sales, I’ll triple the donation.

To celebrate another Bandcamp Friday, I have a brand new release:  Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids!  It’s ten tracks and nearly fifteen minutes of music, so it’s 3.5 times longer than Spooky Season.

Like Spooky Season, Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids features full scores for every part, as well as around 130 MBs of bonus content—videos, pictures, and even some live performance footage.  It’s my most feature-packed release ever, and it’s only $5!

Also, look at this sweet album cover:

Bigfoot - Album Cover

It’s the finest quality MS Paint can provide!

Speaking of my last release, Spooky Season, a collection of seven new compositions with a spooky, autumnal vibe, hit streaming platforms on Sunday, 1 October, but is also available for purchase via Bandcamp!

Spooky Season is just $5, and includes full scores and individual parts for every track—a $28 value!—plus a bonus track.  It’s also crammed with videos, handwritten manuscripts, and other goodies.

The first Friday of a bunch of months in 2023—February, March, April, May, August, September, October, November, and December—will feature this pro-indie music observance, a day on which Bandcamp waives its usual 15% commission on sales.

In other words, when you buy my music, almost 100% of it goes to me, instead of almost 85%.

Currently, my entire discography of eleven releases is $20.89a savings of 50%, which is not bad for eleven releases.  That’s $1.74 per release—not too shabby!  To purchase the full discography, click on any release, and you’ll see the option to purchase all of them.

You can also listen to a ton of my tunes on YouTube (and it’s free to subscribe!).

I’m also selling all of my paintings for $10, with free shipping in the United States, regardless of how many you purchase.  They’re one of kind, so once a painting is purchased, it’s gone.

I’ve also joined Society6, a website that lets artists upload their designs, which can they be printed onto all manner of products (like this throw pillow, or this duvet cover).  Why not get a bookbag with a mouthy droid on it?

I only get 10% of the sales made there, but some of the stuff looks really good—I really want these notebooks with my “Desert View” painting on it (now SOLD!).  Some of them are straight-up goofy, like this church doodle I made celebrating the presidential pardon of Roger Stone (the description for the piece is “Anger your friends with this doodle commemorating the presidential pardon of America’s most dapper political operative“).

I have a few new paintings in the works, and hope to be attending the South Carolina Bigfoot Festival to try to hawk some of my works.  We’ll see how that goes!

My first book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot, is $10 in paperback, and just $5 on Kindle.

My second and newest book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures, is $20 in paperback and $10 on Kindle.

Finally, after I finish Offensive Poems: With Pictures, my planned third book, I’ll be uploading those doodles to Society6 as well.  I have high hopes (perhaps naïvely) for this book, but we shall see.  The doodles are some of my best work—and in glorious color—and without notebook paper lines!

Thanks again for your support!

Happy Friday!

—TPP

TBT^16: The Joy of Autumn

This year is the first time I’ve noticed a pop cultural excitement for autumn.  Sure, people love talking about “sweater weather” and Spooky Season, but this year it’s everywhere.  I’ve witnessed dozen of memes all gleefully proclaiming the arrival of fall before August even had a chance to expire.

The pumpkin spiced everything trend is also back in a big way, and marketers have gone all in to cater to single women with disposable incomes.  In this case, lump me in with the single women.  While I haven’t bought gallons pumpkin spiced lattes (now trendily abbreviated as “PSLs”), I certainly appreciate pumpkin flavoring.

Besides, who doesn’t love the festive rotundity of pumpkins?  They’re so round and jolly—the charismatic, carotene-rich cousins to the lumpy squash.

So it is that I happily greet the start of autumn, even if that does make me a girl.

With that, here is “TBT^4: The Joy of Autumn“:

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Open Mic Adventures XLVIII: “Skeleton Dance No. 2”

I’m hosting a FREE online listening party for Spooky Season on Sunday, 1 October 2023, at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time.  You can RSVP here.

After the unusual success of “Skeleton Dance No. 1” on YouTube, I knew it was time to compose “Skeleton Dance No. 2.”  As is often the case with sequels, “Skeleton Dance No. 2” is far more developed and fleshed-out (no pun intended) than its predecessor.

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Lazy Sunday CXX: Skeletons

Spooky Season is upon us, and yours portly can’t get enough of it.  Pumpkins.  Ghosts.  Skeletons!

So this Sunday, I thought I’d look back at the scant skeleton posts on this humble blog:

Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Compose-a-thon II: Movement

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.

While working on Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids (coming to Bandcamp on Friday, 6 October 2023), I composed a couple of tracks that only somewhat related, “Meandering” and “Plodder.”  These were pieces I’d written snippets of in my composing journal, but which were more or less experiments in unusual meters and concepts.  “Plodder,” for example, is written to be intentionally muddy—lots of low-end bass notes and tight tone clusters, producing something akin to the effect of a small child or a cat leaning on the low keys of the piano:

I added in tuba and bass clarinet (the latter is quickly becoming my favorite, spooky sound) to drive home that thick, sludgy low-end sound.

“Plodder” fits the cryptid theme of the album a bit better of these two “movement”-inspired pieces.  One could imagine Bigfoot or some zombie (are zombies cryptids?; maybe some variations would be considered as such) plodding slowly through the forests, although all the “footage” of “Bigfoot” I’ve seen seems to indicate he’s a fairly fast fellow.

Regardless, I found these two pieces particularly unusual and unorthodox, and opted to share them with you, my faithful subscribers, ahead of the album’s release.

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

Open Mic Adventures XLVII: “Bavarian Bop”

I’ve been composing like a madman while I still have a free demo subscription to Noteflight.  I’ve already composed Spooky Season, and have a sequel composed and set to release on 6 October 2023 on Bandcamp, then to all other streaming platforms on 13 October 2023.  The sequel, Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids, is ten tracks, and will be loaded with bonus features, including the videos featured in today’s post.

One of my favorite pieces from Spooky Season is “Bavarian Bop,” a short piece for small instrumental ensemble that I also rearranged for solo piano.  It’s a little Oktoberfest-inspired bit of musical whimsy.

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