Here's some fun I'm having with my new looping machine.  I'll be performing this at my upcoming live shows.

Sometimes it's hard to articulate how excited you are about something.  And this something I'm VERY excited about.  I'm going to be doing 3 live shows of my own original music!  More info here.  

Daniel Buchanan in Concert
A studio concert featuring original music 
for voice, piano, and electronic media by Daniel Buchanan
and featuring a new painting by Thérèse Murdza

December 4, 5, and 6, 2013
7:30pm
Portland, Oregon

Reserve your seat here

I'm so excited to be headed on tour next week with Cappelle Romana.  We will be performing at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  This is such a unique opportunity.  You can see more info about the tour here.

And I will be posting pictures here, too!

In the meantime, the weather is SO fall now!  The leaves are changing colors in Portland, and it is SO pretty.  This is the music that I wrote today, sort of inspired by the change in weather:

Lastly, I had a great time hosting a "Fall Fling!" with Abby and my friends Fred, Kym, and Malee.  Here's a couple pictures from that event:

My studio is located in a pretty urban neighborhood, right on the corner of a fairly busy street.  Behind the studio is a tire shop with constant drilling sounds, and across the street is a lumber yard with people loading lumber onto trucks all day and general mayhem.  As if that isn't crazy enough, there are 2 major construction projects in process within a block of the studio, including one right outside my window. 

As you can imagine, all this noise tends to make its way into the recordings I make.  (It's not big deal, my studio is more of a lesson studio and classroom than a recording studio.)  Today I decided I would embrace a bit of the noise I'm hearing on a regular basis.  I walked right up the fence of the construction sites nearby and sampled a few sounds. 

So here is a little piece using sampled construction sounds.  Welcome to my world...!

I was traveling last week and realized that I encounter so many interesting sounds while in the airport and on the plane.  I pulled out my iPhone a couple times just to record the sounds I was hearing on an airport shuttle and also on the airplane as it was taking off.  Once I uploaded them to my computer, I thought I would try tearing the sounds apart a little and manipulating them.  So here's my first experiment with that.

And here's a little musical reflection I wrote as well, via some electronic media.

I'm in Austin this week so I don't have my recording equipment with me. But I wrote something and it's on my SoundCloud profile. Here is the link:

Www.soundcloud.com/danielbuchanan

The title is Idea 33.

Here's the thing: I realized from time to time when I'm composing all I feel like is coming out is cliches. So sometimes I feel like those clichés are there for a reason, so I might as well honor them.

It's hard to do that because I'd really rather write something original. But I guess clichés exist for a reason, and they are an integral part of who I am as a musician now. It's hard to love all the aspects of who you are - we just simply want to be who we are now, not who we were in the past. So this week's piece is part of me.

This something pseudo-improvised, based on the idea of "space," which is one of the five elements.

Since I was little, I have been drawn to the hymn tune, "What A Friend We Have In Jesus." This is my new spin on it.

I've just recently figured out that I can record directly onto my iPhone and post to SoundCloud using the SoundCloud app.  Of course, this doesn't get a very good sound quality compared to my other gear, but it's nice to be able to just write something and get it uploaded quickly!  So here's what I wrote today:

Here's Idea 29 - just a chord progression, but it feels very epic to me.  It doesn't stand alone, it's just an "idea." 

A little more work this week with electronic media: