I've been wanting to get some of my musings and thoughts on the music business into a blog post. The following will be random thoughts with some being somewhat coherent and others not so much. This will most likely will be drawn out over several posts because I have a tendency to tell long boring stories of my past. Only a few people know about the music project and its origins so this might help others get to know us better.

First let's get some pronoun business out of the way. Although the music project is but a band of one who wears all the hats, so to speak, I will typically use the pronoun "we". When I write that it makes me think that I (we) am/are exhibiting multiple personality disorder (maybe we are). It just seems simpler to refer to saints in unison as "we". Whilst we have been promoting the project, I have found that using we just works. For instance, saying that "I am saints in unison, a music project out of Western North Carolina" sounds odd to my ears. In a sense, the project is a collective as I am the performing artist, composer, author, recording engineer, record label, and band manager. If you count the face of the band, saint, who is my avatar for the creative part of the project, we truly are a collective of multiple personalities. I guess in someways we could be considered a virtual band.

I would like to muse on the imagery used in our artwork but instead I want to give you a bit of my history from a music perspective.  Maybe I will save that for another post. Before I forget I need to make a mental note to write a post about my thoughts on using social media to promote music. 

Allow me to share a bit of history on the origins of saints in unison and our (my) journey. Early in my childhood, I was introduced to various types of music on vinyl. My father had a decent hifi setup and the weekends, I can remember hearing Glen Campbell and a lot of compilation albums. My first introduction to electronica was a song called Popcorn that I heard on an LP when I was very young in the 70's. Then there was my mother, who could read music and play the organ. Throughout the years, my father had purchased several organs for her and she was an avid player. Occasionally I would attempt to emulate my mother but never really took to it or bothered to learn music notation. I just enjoyed making sounds with the keys.

In the early 80's, I had become obsessed with computers and would often spend hours standing in various stores writing code on Commodore 64 computers that were on display. My father somehow realized I had the knack for computing and purchased a TRS-80 Model III for me. Soon I found myself reverse engineering games and writing text based adventures in BASIC. A few years later, I got a car and started working at a fast food restaurant and left the computing world for that of a typical high-school student.

As a freshman and having a little money from working full-time at night, I started to accumulate a music collection which started with anything and everything Prince and quickly fell in love with New Wave. Very soon my collection was filled with Depeche Mode, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, Skinny Puppy, Joy Division, New Order, The Cure, Chris and Cosey, and countless others. Then came along Nine Inch Nails soon after my senior year was over. I was gobsmacked with Pretty Hate Machine.

I quickly found myself wanting to make music and invested in a 88-key synthesizer midi keyboard, a Boss drum machine, and a Tascam 8 track recorder. Hours were spent laying down synth tracks and drum beats. Most evenings, I was in a local dance club either dancing or DJ'ing. Then I decided to move to Maryland and started working two jobs. I had an aptitude for managing people so I left my aspirations of having a music career behind. After I became burnt out on managing fast food and retail establishments, I decided to go into sales and eventually would come full circle and re-enter the world of computer programming.

The concept for saints in unison was started back in the early nineties. I would often talk about desiring to make music again but was always too busy working and making money to invest the time and energy to pursue the dream. Often I would hang out with hobbyist musicians and would write lyrics to their music mostly for fun. I would often jest about calling my band "saints in unison" and remember the name just popping in my head one day when I was driving to work.

I consider myself to be more of a DJ than a musician and started making music with loops with a piece of Sony software called ACID and would share demos with friends and coworkers. Everyone really liked what they heard so I kept creating songs. I felt confident enough to start uploading songs to various services and got positive feedback. One of those early songs "midnight" was made with using loops and two samples. These were the days before we had things like Sound Cloud and Bandcamp. I honestly cannot recall the name of the services back then as they have been long gone for years.

However, one service I used, BeSonic, actually included one of my songs on a compilation album that was a giveaway for some big music event in Europe. This was back around 2002. I grew tired of trying to find good royalty free loops and ended up investing in some gear. My first "professional" set up was a couple of guitar effects pedals, a MoPhatt, a drum machine, an 88-key keyboard. In my spare time, I would spend many evenings creating songs using loops but now I was creating my own.  I eventually I would ditch the hardware and started using Reason. Again I was never extremely serious about promoting my tracks.

Fast forward about twenty years and here we are with two albums released in 2024 and a third that will be dropped on March 31, 2025. Our music is available on all the major streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music. We have a home on Bandcamp and have been getting a reasonable amount of airplay on WNCW, Amazing Radio, and Radio Wigwam. Our streams and sales have not materialized and we are still relatively unknown. However we own the first couple of pages on search results so I guess our SEO techniques are strong. Nowadays I use a MacBook Pro, Logic Pro, a Chorda, and an Akai MPK mini to create and engineer the music for saints and unison. I'm even registered with BMI and I've spent the time to catalog all of our songs.

We have been relentlessly sending out CD's and emails to various college radio and independent online stations in an attempt to build a grassroots following. Not a single one has responded to our emails except for WNCW and we get played on their Sunday night Eclectic Electric show often. Rachel Hilton seems to be a big fan of our music as she has been playing songs from our first two albums. Spencer Jones, however, simply refuses to play any of our stuff. We are baffled as to why. Maybe one day he will warm up to our music. Nonetheless we are very grateful to be played on a local station that we love dearly.

It is exciting and very encouraging to know that a couple of the DJ's for these online stations such as Amazing Radio and Radio Wigwam have taken an interest in the project. One particular DJ that runs JazzySoul Radio out of Botswana plays "little son" a couple of times a day every day since it was officially released on "a dream I didn't have" back in October. At the time of this writing, it has been streamed over 230 times which is significant considering most of our catalog has gotten hardly any activity.

Along those same lines, we got a couple of Shazams for "way back east" originating out of Cincinnati and during the last Eclectic Electric show "a dream I didn't have" got a couple out Charlotte which might seem like nothing but tells me people have an interest in our sound. At least enough of an interest to try to figure out who was playing.

We need to get back to making music. There will be more to come. Thanks for reading.