Just touching base here. I’m working hard completely reworking an old song I did about ten years ago. I was going to remaster it and post it, but I found it too embarrassing to show publicly. All the instrumentation needs to be completely rethought and redone. Not sure how long this is going to take, but it is not at all like I am going to start writing a song. I’m just replacing instruments and modifying their parts. I hate deadlines, but I’ll wild guess by the end of this month with no promises. I recently completed a long mixing and mastering class. Unfortunately that does not magically enable me to produce radio-ready commercial quality music. I need to still work along those lines for a long time if I ever do achieve that level of expertise. It's like you learned the alphabet and were given a dictionary, now go write a best-selling novel! I was going through an online class from Berklee College of Music and a little assignment was to define yourself as an artist. The formula is:

 Artist 1 + Artist 2, with a healthy dose of Artist 3. 

I thought that was rather easy. Emerson Lake and Palmer + Black Sabbath, with a healthy dose of Chopin. That requires a little explanation because I don’t sound like any of those three. From ELP I like the technical precision and the sparse orchestration — three people. From Sabbath I like their bass player in particular and how on many songs he is adding an extra busy bottom melody making their music polyphonic, and I like the heavy metal aspect. With Chopin we get the classical influence with a sense of drama and great joy, big emotions whether tender or explosive, playful or angry, and his chord construction is something I study with great interest. So, I'm working hard on something I hope will turn out to be very special. Expect my production skills reflected in the quality of the finished project to improve with each song posted, and I HOPE to have something out by August 1, 2017. Jim Gramze (Songs from the Trailer Park)