I have a great day job. I get to make audio productions for the largest audio company in the world, with hundreds of radio stations, streams, thousands of podcasts, and just a MASSIVE footprint.

Sometimes this job requires the musical side of me to pop out and do some stuff because whatever resources I have aren’t quite good enough or exactly the perfect fit. This post will be about that.

I’ve been doing commercials for a local annual event every year, and am very proud and honored to have them as a client. The nature of my contract with the aforementioned day job precludes me from using their resources on stuff that falls outside the company, so I honor that. My library of music to use on outside stuff is minimal at best, and I’m not interested in paying piles of money to license music, because, well, times are tight. So, my composing and performing skills bailed me out. This necessity led to the invention of some music!

The first cut I created is a typical country-rock midtempo stomp tune:

Then that wasn’t quite working the way I wanted, so I checked their other ads to see what sort of things they had in them, and it was more rock-oriented. So to kill both birds with one stone, I came up with this one:

Then this client had some ads for a BBQ fest they were having as part of the larger event, and that one was just BEGGING for some Texas Blues. So I grabbed my Strat and made this little ditty:

It was so fun coming up with bespoke music for these ads that I think I might actually start composing more stuff to use for any non-company stuff I work on. It stoked my creativity in ways it hadn’t been stoked in a while. And it was all so fast and easy to make it all sound good using REAPER and my Line 6 Native, iZotope, Native Instruments, and Steven Slate Design plugins.

I’ve also created jingles and little ad sounders for clients for the day job, which I won’t post here, but if you’re curious, I’ll email them to ya – just get in touch with me.

Thanks for reading and listening, and peace be the journey!

TMS