Turbulator is the working title for my current musical endeavours. Ample material has not been my difficulty for a long time, instead it's the means to produce a final consumable form to my satisfaction.
The first stage began in April 2018, honing my craft, and until January 2024, was a solo pursuit, building my skill levels to a point where I'd be ready to involve other musicians on a professional level that I can match, or at least not inconvenience.
It is important to understand that I'm not a late starter, having some kind of mid life crisis, as I've been playing guitar since age twelve and started composing not long after that and have spent significant periods of time since, studying the art of composition and playing various instruments. There have been previous periods where I've been totally absorbed in it, but I've never been this committed to it, for this long, before. None the less, composition has been a life long passion of mine.
I had kept it to myself all that time and was mostly content with using synthesisers to supplement my voice and guitars to produce tracks of arrangements of my compositions, because I couldn't see a way, that suited my temperament, to work out a fundable music career. So, I made a living teaching maths, computer science and physics, which was in no way a compromise, because I enjoyed that immensely and it helped the development of many of my core values.
The first stage of this project was a five year plan. That may seem arbitrary or even ambitious, but a UK composer I met back in my twenties was of the opinion that a person who'd only dabbled in music so far would have to spend ten years full time to become a decent practicing composer. I didn't base myself on that strictly, but I'd had enough experience to understand how long it took to get certain skills to a competent level and between the ages of twelve and sixty two I had already built a substantial base of many aspects of music composition and performance, beyond the dabbling level, to make an educated guess.
Finishing those five years in April 2023, after much angst and soul searching, I concluded that I was very happy with my progress, because the experience gave me a much more realistic perspective on what I could expect. I felt that at least another year was still required and then, after nine months, starting in February 2024, I became almost totally absorbed in finishing my first album, which was finally released on 21st June, 2024.
Along the way I've been drawn into creating some full blown Zappa covers. It was not my original intention to do so and I had previously only published videos on YouTube playing solo instrument covers of FZ's music that I play for practice. But, having been under the gun to produce covers to a deadline on two of Andrew Greenaway's Cordelia Records projects, has had nothing but positive effects on my process. I've now decided to create a Zappa tribute album. I've got a concept with a title worked out and I'm close to finalising the track list. Now that my first album is finished, I have refocussed some significant attention on that project alongside my second album.
As I said above, I've been playing guitar all my life, but also piano for quite some time before this Turbulator project began. Initially, I added drums and alto and bari saxes to my performing repertoire, and focussed on being able to play all of these instruments to a reasonable level for recording live tracks to form the core of demos of some of my compositions. Then I was hoping to attract other musicians to my project and form a band to play the music live.
Turbulator remains a solo pursuit. For one reason or another, the just mentioned aspect of my plan has fizzled out. The original title for my first album, when I first began dreaming about its possibility in 2018, was One Thing At A Time, for obvious reasons. Aside from the possibilities of multi tasking, that's what I have to do to put productions of my compositions together. It was exhausting initially, but as various skills have evolved, it turns out that it's a very invigorating process and I've actually come to really like working this way, and there are more albums in the pipe line following a similar model.