Warren Smith
(Warren Smith)

Bio:


Born in a Minnesota blizzard, I'm now residing in a coastal heat of Brooklyn, New York City.

I recorded my first original composition as a teenager using a reel-to-reel tape recorder back in 1967, and I'm still finding it a creative challenge to make original music, although now I'm doing it digitally with a iMac and GarageBand. Writing and recording music always has been a personal, artistic exercise, so posting material on the macjams site has been an expansive experience for me.

Besides writing "solo" songs, I recently finished a larger project, a collection of 100 songs based on melodies that manifested while walking my neighborhood streets of Brooklyn. It took four years to complete and, as with any large undertaking, there was much frustration, much learning and many rewards. Feedback from this online community has been very helpful in my development.

I have also collaborated with fellow macjammer Tim McFate, under the moniker "Riverrats."

July 2006 - I'm taking a break from writing and recording new material in order to concentrate on a different kind of musical project - pulling together material from the past 14 years under the umbrella of "Collected Songs." Much of this material was recorded on tape (I think I started recording digitally in 1997), so right now my energy is going into converting the analog to digital.

Fall 2006 - While walking on my way home from a get-together with an old friend to celebrate the passing of a mentor, a melody jumped into my head. I made a memo of it in my usual manner - by whistling the notes into an iPod as a voice message - and, as numerous melodies followed, it became the genesis of a new music project with the general title, "Streets Songs."

Most of 2007 was taken up with developing Street melodies into complete songs. This amounted to about 80 pieces. I collaborated with Richard Schletty on a Macjams song, "Pre-approved." Late in the year I took a couple of freelance design jobs outside of New York and that completely disrupted any musical production.

2008 - Worked on melodic development of several musical suites; one posted here ("Celtic Suite"). Managed to finish a CD of original music, which included polished and extemporaneous pieces. Two of those songs ("Stacked" and "Masque") put up here on Macjams.

Macjams collaborations with Richard Schletty ("PastPresentFutureTense") and with Richard, Jack "Dadai" Miller and Neil "Jiguma" Porter on "Hitting the Road."

2009 - Thrown out of work by the collapse of the freelance market in the fashion industry, I spent a considerable amount of time working on "Blue Period" music, while also developing a collection of mostly guitar-based songs for an album titled "Paradigm Lost."

2010 - I changed my general approach to making an album of new music. In the past I would work on a group of songs until it seemed like there was a cohesive collection. I would give it a title, create artwork, burn the songs to a CD and then distribute it to family and friends. For some reason I now decided on the title first, which would simply be called "2010." That changed the methodology. I would work on music over the course of the year and at the year's end I would cherry-pick from those efforts to make a new album. It may not seem like much of a distinction, but it felt like a more comfortable way to approach developing original ideas.

2011 - I took the same general approach and ended up with a new album chosen from a year's worth of activity called "Morning Person," because after having picked 16 songs for the collection (out of 52 possibilities) I noticed there were three songs with the word "morning" in their titles.

2012 - New album of 17 songs culled from a year of production, called "Ascension." Three of those songs posted here at Macjams.