Music that I've Written
Bandcamp website????
It's true, boys and girls. While browsing one of my favorite, most creative webcomics, I came across the website Bandcamp.com, and chose to investigate further. Upon said further investigation, I decided to sign up - it's free, after all, right? After said signing-up, I was busy with other stuff for a couple weeks. Then today (August 19, 2009) I was bored, and on my laptop, and I decided to upload a CD I'd created, named "Nick Leep: Piano Pieces and Compositions." If you're one of my grandparents, you likely have a copy of this CD (with a misprinted label; tracks 3 and 5 are switched). If you're one of my friends, you might have something rather similar to it. If not, you've never heard of it, and should go over to http://a2020vision.bandcamp.com/ and take a look at it!
I'm rather glad I ran across this site. I've been trying for a while to find a site like this, but thus far haven't found any site that does this in an acceptable fashion. Youtube? no. Imeem? eh... Myspace? NO.
My eventual plan is to replace this page (the one you're currently on) with that one (so that you can type in http://iit.edu/~nleep/music/ and end up at http://a2020vision.bandcamp.com. But I won't do that until all of the songs that are on this page are there, so don't worry about your favorite Nick Leep song disappearing forever from the Interweb.
In the mean time, I'm going to be embedding the "new" stuff I put there in here. Colors won't be all that great, but I'm planning to redesign and re-colorify this site anyway. So, without further ado:
And I'm going to explain more about the EP that I uploaded here. You'll notice that you can download some tracks by themselves, while some only come with the album. The ones you cannot download are ones that other people wrote. While I'm pretty sure most or all of those composers are long dead and any attached copyrights are long expired, I'm still iffy about putting them up for public download. Besides which, I'm not entirely thrilled with my piano-playing...
New Music!
Here are two new recordings that I've made. The first one is the first recording of a simple song that, on July 16th, 2009,
I decided to make when several small musical tidbits I'd been working
on clicked together. There are
two blended guitar parts, on this version both recorded on my acoustic. In future version I hope
to use both electric and acoustic guitars, but I just used what was handy for the first one...
The second track is an extension of a warm-up, messing around kind of thing that I've been doing
since I started to guitar.
Below are the old contents of this page. When I feel like it, I'll go back and re-edit and clean up or rearrange or whatever... not today though
Nicholas "Goggles" Leep III
Before I decided to become an engineer, I was almost 100% sure that I was going to go into music. There are perfectly good reasons I decided to become an engineer (like I'm good at math and science), however the same reasons could have applied to music (I'm at least decent with writing and performing it). So throughout high school, and continuing some until today, I have written and recorded several songs.
Below should be a little player with some of the songs I've written. My music-writing program lets me export the songs as MIDI or synthesized MP3 files, and I'm putting them here for you to enjoy. Below that, I talk a bit about each, and about the CD that I made in winter 2007.
What I'm up to now: Guitar songs
Several years ago, I got an acoustic guitar for Christmas. I kind of messed with it a bit, but it wasn't like it was that big of a deal. By the time I went to IIT I was playing it a lot more, and getting less bad at it. Eventually I started putting chords together all by myself and this is one of the things resulting from that, plus working on it a lot more lately. It needs a lot more work, and stuff, but yeah.
coming soon: descriptions and defenses of all the tracks herein. Also possibly downloads for them.
My CD!!!
In December 2007, I put together a good deal of the music I've written onto a CD. The first part is some piano music that my grandma recorded before I came to college. The second half is music that I have composed ( my music-writing program, Finale PrintMusic!, allows me to export MIDI versions of my compositions as mp3's). I have put up a disc image of that CD on my personal web server, but since this computer's off most of the time... you'd have better luck just asking me to give you a copy. (Sooner or later I may put up the tracks off of it the same way the other compositions are up there, but I'm busy getting this website up and running at the moment so it'll have to wait). There will also be links to the musical scores (PDF) and direct downloads for the audio files (mp3's) for each song.
Electronic copies of other songs
Untitled 4 Band (Version 3.0)
For more info about the origins of this piece (or, as it stands right now, this piece of a piece), read the section for the old version below. The other day I thought that this overture-ish piece might make a great starting point for an instrumental musical, or opera, or some similar thing. I'll see how this piece develops, and go from there.
Untitled 4 Band
"Untitled 4 Band" is a song I began writing sometime in 2006. I finished it early in 2007 (sometime in January) and now I'm going back over it with my newfound music-theory skills, and making it better, making sure it follows all the rules, that kind of thing. See version 3.0 above for the newer version (but feel free to compare)
Griffith Overture
I began writing some of the themes I used in "Griffith Overture" a long long time ago, when I was younger, and playing piano, and didn't feel like practicing the music I had and wanted to make something up instead. Then I began working on the first part sometime in 2004, and I finished up a brass arrangement for the beginning in early 2005. During fall of 2005 I finished writing the song in its entirety, and we (GHS band) performed it in our May concert, and I directed it at graduation.
Short Clarinet Quartet
This is the beginning of another song that I started writing in spring 2007. This is all I've got so far, but I'm sure I can use it for something later.
Amazing Grace (arranged for French Horn trio)
This one is very cool. I was asked if I could write an arrangement of "Amazing Grace" for three horns. This is what I came up with. I really want to go back over it and make it even better, but all I know is that it sounded so cool to actually have real instruments playing something I wrote (ok I guess this happened once at Griffith too, but this is horns, and horns who play really well too).
that's all folks! I'll update it as I have more to... update! Hopefully the guitar demos will improve or something.