As a guitar player, I write a lot of my own pieces of music but usually none of them turn into full songs. I’m a rhythm guitar player so I tend to write short bits of music known as “riffs”, but when I try to expand on them and add lyrics, vocals and other instruments, it often doesn’t feels right. It usually feels forced so I give up on it and I’m left with a ton of unused riffs.

I’m starting to work on my debut solo album made up of these riffs but instead of trying to force them into full songs I’m going to just concentrate on the music itself. No lyrics, no vocals, all instrumental. Some of them might not even have guitar in them, I don’t know. I’m gonna see where each song takes me and go with it.

I’m going to be playing multiple instruments and mixing them together. I imagine it will take some time for each song to reach completion but they’re going to be short. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to finish an entire album, I’m thinking probably a year.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time but have never found an approach that I was totally comfortable with and had complete confidence in. After playing guitar for more than 20 years, I have a lot of my own music saved up. I don’t know if it will all fit on one album, I think I might have as many as 50 riffs in my repertoire, though I probably won’t use them all.

I’ve started working on what I’m pretty sure will be the first song, all I have right now is the riff itself. I might post a sneak preview sometime soon. I’ve posted some of my other music in this blog but those were pretty much demos, they’re not completely finished songs. What I’m working on will be finished songs as I see them, I’m not really concerned with whether they’re conventional or not.

I’m really looking forward to working on this and finishing it on my terms. It’s going to be a lot of work since I’m going to be doing absolutely everything myself but it’s something I want to get out into the world. It feels right, I think it’s time to let my music speak for itself.