Northern LightsThe third and final part of the space theme projects; Night Skies, Space In Music, and now Northern Lights. This is a cd that encompasses all the elements of my last three projects with an added flavor of saxophone by good friend and fellow jazz bandmate Walter Robinson. For me personally this is the kind of music I was looking for about four years ago when I was thinking about doing some live solo projects. I didn't necessarily want to do it on the bass guitar, nothing against the bass, I just knew it was already alot going on with that solo wise. I was looking for something different. I happened to stumble across an instrument on YouTube called the Hang Drum, that changed everything for me... from that I was led to the tongue drum and so on / long story short" Northern Lights", a beauitful tongue drum cd (my opinion LoL) with a hint of Akai MPD 26/32 for synth pads. Northern Lights was recorded using several tongue drums, three Zen Tambours built by Steve Finch at Exotic Vessels, one Milltone by Larry Miller, one wing by Freenotes, two Tamboa's by Gilles Perrault from Canada and a few metal Bellisphere's , Artbells and a wooden A-minor drum by my good friend Steve Roberts at TongueDrum.com, also in the mix was a few patches from Soniccouture's Pan Drums, I can't thank all you guys enough. As with my other projects the song titles coincide with what I think about when I see this Aurora of beautiful dancing lights. For example, Aalto University conducted a study by recording static-like sounds related to the Aurora Borealis in Finland (2012). These sounds come from the solar particles associated with creating the Aurora, I tried to incorporate little things like this into the recording (static eerie gree, magnetic midnight ) and so on. I think there is an art to recording, I'm still working at that especially with drums of this type, the sounds are very soft so you tend to pickup a little hiss and other things even with good microphones, that being said, I hope the ideas of what I'm going for in the music come through more so than the recording itself. The connection between Northern Lights and Tongue Drums may seem odd to some but I see both individually beautiful and wanted to put the two together. I think music is like food, sometimes we want something different and for me this has been very fulfilling to create and for you the listener, well, I hope you find something also.