Far Cry Studio: Home

I've had a fascination with music for as long as I can remember. Way back in the 5th grade I got into the school band playing the coronet. I had a great time but ended up not continuing with it because of some health problems our family was dealing with at the time. I dabbled with playing the guitar off and on but never really got anywhere. My friends in those days just weren't into that kind of stuff.

Skip forward to the college undergrad days: I decide somewhere along the way that I should learn how to play the keyboard. To this end I go and get myself a cool Kawai keyboard (a lot of money for a poor college student) and start taking piano lessons. Somewhere in there, some friends and I start a band. We never played a single gig but we laughed a lot and had some good clean fun. But college being college, classes intrude, people move on, etc... and so the band became a grand memory.

Since then, many instruments and many diversions have come and gone. By far the most difficult thing I ever tried to learn to play was the tenor saxophone. I cannot stress enough how hard that was. Unfortunately, I never did find an instrument that I have any kind of talent for. The lack of talent is greatly compounded by the lack of practice time. One thing I did learn, however, was to never sell instruments... hey, I might come back to that thing some day!

At least my wife (of 15 years now!) tolerates my follies. She is a superb clarinetist and is pretty passable on the flute. She marched in one of the country's best marching bands when she was in college and could have pursued a music career if she chose. She herself has experimented with the classical guitar and, most recently, the keyboard. So she doesn't always like me blowing money on musical goose chases but at least she understands it at some level. It's probably a good thing or I'd be dead by now.

The end result of all this is that we have accumulated quite a selection of instruments: drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, and a variety of wind instruments. We ended up turning our den into a "studio" just to cut down on the clutter in all the other rooms. Until recently, though, "studio" was a misnomer... we had no way of recording. But thanks to a friend - an bandmate from those long-ago college days - recruiting me to work on FAWM with him this year, we now have the equipment to do some basic recording. Far Cry is born!

I doubt that my contributions this year will anything other than piteous but I am hopefull that this endeavor challenges me to actually create something instead of just wishing I could. At the end of the day, what I really want to do is have fun and laugh again... all for the pure joy of making some music.

However you define that...

My earliest memories are of listening to 50's rock, a style I still enjoy today (but don't listen to very much). Mostly, though, I remember the country and western my parents listen to. I loathed it then and I loathe it to this day (though, for a weird twist, I do like some bluegrass). Kiss and Cheap Trick weighed pretty heavy in those prepubescent days. Unfortunately, this was also during the disco era. We shall speak no more of that.

In high school I was into heavy metal. The power and the energy were addictive and the rebellious aspect didn't hurt, either. Iron Maiden album covers, in particular, seemed to raise parental eyebrows. To their credit, though, my parents never gave me much grief about what I listened to. I was a shy kid, maybe they figured that was my way of "acting out". I was probably a junior when a friend introduced me to Rush. I know it's cliched to say so, but that changed my life. Lyrics that weren't about getting laid, complex and oft-changing time signatures, wild song structures... this is the music that spoke to me and it's been a constant in the ebb and flow of my listening habits ever since.

While an undergrad, I saw Maynard Ferguson and his band play live and that opened my eyes to a genre of music I'd barely even heard: jazz. I started off with "smooth" fusion bands like the Yellow Jackets and the Rippingtons. That lead to "real" fusion bands like Weather Report. And that lead me to all the other forms of jazz. I dearly love Coltrane, Miles, Monk, Duke and too many others to mention, old and new alike. Although I don't much like those smooth jazz bands that got me into jazz any more, I gotta give them a nod for putting me on a great path of discovery.

For the last couple of years, I've circled back around and have been listening to a lot of progressive rock and metal. Since this scene has been mostly dead in the US, almost all of the bands I listed to these days harken from other countries. This style never waned in Europe; in fact, it blossomed. There's even some excellent prog bands out of Central America. And internet radio means easy access to tons of stuff I wouldn't otherwise get a chance to hear. A tip-o-the-hat goes out to Progulus Radio for providing excellent volcanic tunage.