When inspiration streaks (or how I became a composer)

If someone had told me even one year ago that I would be recording an album with my own songs I would have laughed.

Sure, I´ve been playing piano for a long time – and improvising has been part of that for many years. But still – “composing” seemed very far away, not to mention the patience to practice…

But isn´t that the beauty of being a scanner – you never know what waits around the corner!

One day in late May 2017 I received a very unusual gift – and this changed everything: Like many times before, I sat down by the piano and started to play.  Two hours later I had recorded 12 totally new songs.

I have no idea where those songs came from – but obviously, the inspiration was very powerful that day.  Unfortunately, my recording equipment wasn´t even close to that league… I had recorded the songs in my cell phone, with the help only of my crappy headset microphone.

The sound quality was lousy, but the songs had something in them that made me think they deserved a better destiny than to just get lost in the eternal archives of a smartphone.

Still, it would take me some time to figure out exactly WHAT I was going to do with all those recordings. I´m honestly not a very skillful pianist – I tend to play new songs all the time rather than practicing and really learning a piece… So what was I to do with all these songs, that I actually really, really liked?

After briefly considering trying to find someone who could play them better than me, I finally decided to make something very unusual for me: Practice!

So that´s what I´ve been doing lately – and learning a lot about recording technique. I´m still not quite where I need to be to make the songs sound the way I hear them in my head – but I´m getting closer every day