Finding the Time to Make Music as a Grownup

“Works 14-18” by yours truly – available for purchase on Bandcamp March 29th, or for pre-order now!

By day I am a professional software engineer, but the only reason I went into this line of work is technically because of experimental IDM electronic music from the 90s. (Actually, if I peel it further back, it’s because I got into weird David Firth flash animations on Newgrounds as a teenager, from whose videos I discovered Boards of Canada.)

Wild to think this guy is the reason I have a job right now, in a roundabout way.

Accidental Software Engineer

Despite writing software for a living, I was never a “coding since 8 years old” script kiddie, and never really considered it as a future career option. All I cared about as an adolescent was music. In high school I was a card-carrying bandie, enrolled in every music class I could cram into my timetable, and even played in an extracurricular R&B band (shout out to Mr. Whitney and Soul 62, which is still going strong today!) I was fairly good at math and science, but took the bare minimum required to graduate – my heart was in the music.

Through the aforementioned David Firth, I discovered Warp Records around age 15 or 16, and the strange sounds coming from artists on the label quickly put my music taste in a stranglehold for the next several years. I think I had pretty much every Aphex Twin track I could find on the internet on my iPod at the time. This obsession inspired me to mess around with GarageBand (later Logic Pro 8) and make fun little terrible electronic tunes in my spare time.

Warp Records, and IDM more generally, served as my gateway drug to the world of house and techno music. At VEMF (Victoria Electronic Music Festival, RIP), I saw Rennie Foster spin a house set in 2010, which thoroughly entranced me; this led me to dive into the world of house and techno, discovering the BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix archives, and spurring a (thus far) life-long love affair with 4-on-the-floor dance music.

R.I.P. VEMF! Good times were had.

All this led me to apply for the (fantastic!) combined Music and Computer Science program at UVic. I spent five great years learning all about synthesis techniques, music composition, recording techniques, programming, and much more – and met many friends I’m still close with to this day. One of them introduced me to my wife! With friends, I also had a ton of fun making music, like with my pal Jordie as Garden City Disco, as well as DJing (shoutout to the Kisber Avenue sessions with Brennan, Claire, Pascale, Jordie, and Cam!) We spent many evenings playing music on my old Traktor 4 controller over the CFUV airwaves.

I had no delusions about becoming a famous DJ or music producer. Still, my obsession with electronic music gave me ideas of becoming involved in the music industry in some way – perhaps as an audio or recording engineer, or a composer. While I did indeed learn a ton about music, audio and recording while at UVic, and thoroughly enjoyed my time there, the combined nature of the degree somewhat accidentally led me to the discovery that I quite enjoy programming and software development (and was pretty good at it, to boot.)

Never Hoard Your Work

Fast forward to today, where I’ve been working professionally as a software developer for 8 years, and still really enjoy what I do. I wouldn’t be where I am today, however, without music. It’s something I do wrestle with (as does any creative person who makes a living doing something else, which is likely most creative people) – how does one make space for a creative passion while working as a professional? In my case, how do I make time and energy for music making on the computer when I already spend 40 hours a week in front of the computer for money?

I’m still figuring this out, and likely will be throughout the various stages of my life. Admittedly, lately, I’ve been feeling less creative – it’s been almost four years since I last put out music. Recently, however, I was reading the fantastic book “Staying Composed” by Dale Trumbore (the partner of a former colleague of mine at Ableton.) The book discusses how to approach the various troubles and problems of creative work, with many great suggestions, and one that resonated with me was the idea of “never hoarding your work” – compositions or tracks should be shared with the world, regardless of whether or not you think they’re as good as they could be, as every piece of work you produce is part of your creative journey.

Highly recommend.

In my creative rut, this advice inspired me to dig through my hard drive for old Live projects, where I found a handful of tracks that were basically finished (I just never quite found myself happy with them at the time.) I spent some time late last year polishing them up and mixing them, then sent them over to my friend and fantastic mastering engineer Anthony Shackell for mastering.

Wax Mathews – Works 14-18

The result is my new EP “Works 14-18”, a collection of tracks written and produced sometime or other between 2014 and 2018 – the tail end of my university years and the start of my professional career. As a nice bonus, I’ve found that mixing and polishing up these tunes has helped me brush up my rusty mixing and production skills, and allowed me to get used to my current studio space in our basement, which I’m hoping to parlay into more music-making in the years to come!

A sneak preview of the tracks on the EP! Thanks, Bandcamp Exclusive Embed Functionality!

So, there you have it. My pal Steve and I run a label on the side, “Half Past Vibe Records,” and we’re putting these tunes out in just under a week, at which point you’ll be able to listen on Spotify, or purchase the EP on Bandcamp (you can even pre-order it now). I’m pretty proud of these tunes – they represent a sample of a good chunk of my mid-20s, and with them out in the world, more folks than just myself can enjoy them!

Steve Bjornson and I DJing somewhere in Metchosin in 2019, with Steve doing his best Richard D. James face

Bringing Web 2.0 Back in a Web 3.0 World

Welcome to my personal Internet weblog!

My name is James, and I look forward to sporadically remembering that I have a blog and using it to share my unsolicited thoughts, ideas, and opinions on the World Wide Web.

James and Jasmine on top of the High Line in New York City.
My wife Jasmine and I were on the High Line in the City of New York in August of 2023. Also, image uploads appear to work!

A personal guarantee is that everything you read on this blog is 100% organic, free-range human-generated content (for better or worse!) No Generative AI was used in the creation of this post. I’m mostly mentioning this to capitalize on the current hype machine surrounding GenAI for SEO reasons.

A little about me: at the time of writing, I’m a senior software developer at Workday in Victoria, B.C., where I help to develop the media upload, transcoding and playback stack as part of the Workday Media Cloud team. In my spare time, I enjoy running, reading, and creating unnecessary home automations with Home Assistant; automatically brewing coffee when we head to the kitchen in the morning is a hit with my wife.

I also enjoy various musical pursuits – I sing in a local choir, produce electronic dance music, and am a lapsed jazz pianist – though I can still fake my way through the odd lead sheet…

A headshot of James against a background of trees.
Proof that I have a head and a face!

If you want to connect with me on social media, you can find me on LinkedIn and Instagram. Occasionally, I’ve even been known to commit dubious lines of code to GitHub and upload questionable DJ sets and mixes to the cloud.

My SEO plugin is recommending I bump up the word count, so for even more content, you can check out my Privacy Policy. I’m quite proud of it – I spent dozens of seconds changing the default copy and tweaking the grammatical tense of the text.

Thanks for visiting and stay tuned for some good old-fashioned textual web content!