Introductions...

Welcome to "The Open Musician". Who am I? What is it? And what is the goal?

I am a musician by hobby - not yet by trade, but I'll get to that in a minute. I have played the piano for a number of years, and do a bit with making my own variations/improvisations of the pieces that I play. I've found it easy to pick up other instruments, and my favorite instrument is the classic pipe organ. While I had lessons on the piano in the past, they didn't go very far - namely because of my maturity at the time and because the instructors I had did not meet me where I was, so the duopoly of it all pushed me away from lessons. However, about 6 months ago I started organ lessons under a very reputable instructor, and it has paid off for me tremendously. So that's who I am...you'll find out more over the comings months of this blog.

But the question still remains - what is this blog? What is its goal?

I've entitled this blog "The Open Musician". Namely because it is going to revolve around three things - music, open dialog, and open tools; and by open I am primarily referring to Open Source Tools that anyone can get access to and help out on.

By trade I am a software engineer and computer programmer; however, I have an equal or greater passion for music, which I have been doing longer than I have been in computers. For a long time I have been considering doing some recording of my own, even some song writing; but I don't want to go to the big studio houses to do it - I want to do it myself. I want to record the tracks, mix them, and publish it out. I'll probably seed some tracks on a P2P network, and also look into doing a deal with Apple for iTunes, perhaps Amazon.com, and some others too to yield some income, however small it may be, from this too. So that's my intention on what I am doing with the music.

So what is this open dialog thing? As I go through the journey of writing, recording, and publishing music, and researching everything involved, experiment with software and hardware, etc. I will be chronicling it here - create a dialog between myself as an amateur artist and others so that we may be able to go through this journey together, and perhaps inspire other artists too. Who knows - may be a reader of this blog will grow famous by the ideas presented here.

So, no matter what you take from this, hopefully I can at least give you an impression of the hardware and software that is out there so that you too can record your own music for others.