Category: music

New Song – “Pavane” – On Bandcamp

Posted on 2023-04-09 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

Lee Jackson - "Pavane" Cover For the first time in nearly a year, I’ve got a brand new song finished and up on Bandcamp! The song, “Pavane,” is a slow, melancholy, electronic dance, although many have described it more as “spooky” than anything else. In any case, it’s been getting really good reviews, so I hope you’ll take the time to grab a copy for yourself at this Bandcamp link.

The version that’s on Bandcamp is actually the second revision of the song. I posted the first version up on SoundCloud as a test to get feedback. Like I said, I hadn’t written a new song in almost a year, mainly due to the number of illnesses and hospitalizations I’ve had to deal with, and I wanted to make sure my composition chops were in shape. Sure enough, I’d made a few errors that required a new mix and a remaster, which I got done along with the cover art just in time for April’s Bandcamp Friday post by Cherry Audio (they’d promised to include me in their social post and their Feature post for the week). The reason they included me was that I composed the song using nothing but Cherry Audio’s Mercury-6 synth – ten instances of it, mind you, but still. 🙂

(If you haven’t figured it out by now, I like Cherry Audio synths. And you should too.)

In any case, “Pavane” is still up for sale on Bandcamp, and I encourage you to buy a copy. Proceeds will go toward getting more music written. 🙂

New Music Collaboration In The Works

Posted on 2023-03-23 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

Agony logo A contest has just concluded over in Facebook involving the Bass Guitar player from the San Antonio-based Nü-metal band Agony and myself. The Bass Guitarist, Alan Wehrmann, would toss out a one-liner from Duke Nukem 3D (specifically from E1L1, “Hollywood Holocaust”), and then I would post a riddle to accompany it. The idea was to point people toward what the two of us were cooking up: a secret collaboration between his band and myself on a Nü-metal version of “Stalker,” the music from E1L1 of Duke Nukem 3D. We declared a winner early this morning.

So now, the cat is out of the bag. Agony and myself are cooking up something we hope will be worth listening to, at least if you are a fan of the heavier of the heavy metal genres. It’s going to be very loud, it’s going to be very crunchy, and it’s going to be very growly – very much unlike the original “Stalker.” I’m stoked.

The whole thing started off when I saw Alan post something about music on Doomworld in the “Everything Else” forum. I learned that he was with a band, listened to their music, and issued him and his band a friendly challenge: remake “Stalker” in his band’s style. Agony talked it over, and Alan told me they decided to go for it.

Right now, my role in the new version of the song has been limited to consulting from afar. Soon, however, I hope to attend a rehearsal with my MIDI setup and possibly contribute to the sound. Maybe. They may not need me – only time will tell. Regardless, this is going to be fun, and I hope you will enjoy it, too.

An Audio Silver Lining

Posted on 2023-03-07 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

SoundCloud 300x300 Cloudmark For the first time in quite some while, things have started getting musically busy around here. Since my last entry, I’ve finally started taking advantage of my long-neglected user account over on SoundCloud and have been busy posting some of my albums and other music over there. Three albums are up, although one (Derivations) is missing an Album Commentary track (the free SoundCloud account I have limits how much you can post by total time, and I hit the limit before I could get all of Derivations’ tracks up.).

Here are the links to the albums that are on SoundCloud:

I’ve also posted a couple of single pieces of music, although one of them is technically one track with four pieces of music in it. More on that later. The first single is a piece I did in 2002 for “Duke Nukem Forever,” and it’s called the Lenoman Theme. The piece is an intro to an in-game late-night talk show. If you play it, try playing it on loop a few times. I think you’ll like the results.

The other track isn’t an album or game track at all. Instead, it’s something from my history – 1984, to be precise. Back in that summer, I was a member of a Drum and Bugle Corps out of Houston, Texas called the Nighthawks. During a rehearsal stop at Hixon High School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the mallet percussion section (bells (me), xylophone, marimba, vibraphone) recorded our repertoire for that year’s show. We played four pieces: “The Sinfonians” by Clifton Williams, “From Mighty Oaks,” a drum feature called “Classical Drag” by Vincent Paredes, and music from the motion picture “Somewhere in Time.” I wrote the mallet parts for the first piece and co-wrote the mallet parts for the second piece. You’ll also hear a couple of voices on the recording: mine is the first voice you’ll hear (the other is our xylophone player, Steve McDonald, speaking for his own tape recorder).

I invite you to listen to all of the pieces I’ve put online. If I can ever scrape together the money for their “Next Pro” annual subscription, which comes with more storage time, I’ll upload more works. If you want to contribute to that cause, either buy some of my music from my Bandcamp page or make a donation via my Paypal.me page. I would greatly appreciate either one. Thank you!

New – “Song of the Weekend” Archive Online

Posted on 2023-02-10 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

There’s a new feature available here on my website – the Song of the Weekend Archive!

You see, starting back in 2019, I used to do what was called the Song of the Weekend over in the Lee Jackson Audio Community Discussion Group on Facebook. Every other week, I’d let the members vote on a group of three of the songs I’ve written to choose which one would be the Song of the Weekend. I would do a write-up on the winning song, including history, anecdotes, musical analysis (where possible), and any other information I could come up with. This went on until the Spring of 2022, when I started getting too sick to post it regularly.

Anyway, the write-ups from the Song of the Weekend winners are now available for reading in PDF form from my website! No need to dig through a Facebook thread anymore. Simply go the Song of the Weekend Archive top page and choose if you want to browse by date or alphabetical order. It’s not a complete discography of my works, but it’s a pretty big collection. Please take a look today!