Back in January 2011, Arnprior (the town I live in) had its competition to choose its finalists for the Renfew County Idol. I wasn’t going to bother because I’ve been so busy with work (day job) and web design freelance work, but my stepdaughter convinced me to as she was also going to try out for her age group, so I tried out for the adult age group.

I was originally going to sing a Frank Sinatra song, but I felt God pulling me in a different direction, and I felt led to sing Voice of a Savior by Mandisa. I’d heard this song a few times on the radio and liked it so much that I bought it on iTunes, but I didn’t know it well enough to sing it for a competition, so I started listening to it as much as possible and learning it as well as I could, memorizing the lyrics, and asking a friend to be my accompanist as back-up tracks were not allowed for the competition. To be completely honest, I’d never competed in anything before, and was extremely nervous! 2 finalists were chosen for the adult category, and I was one of them! Unfortunately, my stepdaughter didn’t win as a finalist for her age group as the person who did win sung opera – it’s hard to compete with that!

Basically, Renfrew County is made up of many towns west of the city of Ottawa, so finalists were chosen from each town and the finalist competition is going to be on Saturday, June 11th, 2011 in Petawawa. I’ve been so busy that I really didn’t have time to even think about posting anything here about it, but it’s been more on my mind lately as the date gets closer and closer, so here it is – my exciting news!

I’m looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time as the nerves are kicking in again, but even if I don’t win, I know that I will have won for sharing the message of the song with others who may need to hear it.

If you live in, or will be in the Ottawa Valley area here in Canada and you’d like to go, click here to read the visitor information. Petawawa is just over two hours west of the city of Ottawa, so it’s a bit of a drive, but I hope it’ll be fun and my nerves don’t get the best of me!

Wish me luck!

Big news! So, I don’t have a CD yet – my time has been spent between my regular day job as a Technical Trainer, and my freelance web design work, but since I’ve spent the past 3 years learning as much as I can about web design with WordPress, I’ve finally been able to set up a nice little ecommerce system for my music site here at Tathiana.com to sell my music online! The payment option available is PayPal, and each individual song listed on the music page is available to be purchased for $1, or you can buy all 13 for $10! (USD)

I’m very excited to be able to offer this option – I know some of you have been waiting for this for a while, and I truly appreciate your patience with me!

Eventually, I will re-release my CD (and maybe find time to compose more music), but for now, I’m very excited to be able to offer you my music right here! I will continue to stream my songs so that you can still come here to listen, but if you’d like to have your own mp3 copy of any (or all) of my pieces, please don’t hesitate to jump on this option!

As a bonus, I’m offering 25% off the $10 option to buy all of my compositions to the first 30 people who purchase it, or until June 30th, 2011 – whichever comes first, so if you enjoy my music, don’t miss this awesome discount! That means you can get all my current music for just $7.50 USD! Just use the coupon code SPRING2011 in your shopping cart before you checkout!

If you have any problems at all with this new system, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

Now, I need your help. I’m considering setting up a proper newsletter that you can sign up for, and as an incentive, I’m considering giving away my arrangment of “The First Noel” (who doesn’t like Christmas music?), so I need to know if you like that idea! If you do, please leave a comment below to let me know – the more comments and votes I get, the more likely I will be to set that up! Any other suggestions/comments are also appreciated!

Thank you again for your patience, and I’m looking forward to seeing your comments!

Ok, so I haven’t been able to re-release my CD yet due to the up-front cost necessary. With a family to support, it’s just not feasible for me as an independent artist who happens to work a “regular” day job, PLUS now also freelancing web design on the side to help make ends meet.

However, in the all the experience I’ve gained with my web design and entrepreneur ventures at UC Web Creations, I think I’ve found a good, low-cost solution to be able to sell my music online through my website! Payments would be processed via PayPal, and I’m thinking of setting it up so that you can purchase individual tracks at $1.00 USD each, or all 13 of my current tracks for $10.00 USD. I think this is a fair price.

If you’d like to sign up to receive updates from Tathiana.com for when this becomes available (and other news/updates), please enter your email address below! You will receive an e-mail to confirm that you want to indeed sign up for updates from Tathiana.com (I hate spam as much as you do, so don’t worry, I’ll only be sending updates when there are actual updates to let you know about), and once you’ve confirmed your email address, you’ll be set up to receive updates from me on occasion!

Email address:

I look forward to keeping in touch with you! As an indie (independent) artist, I truly appreciate the fans I do have out there, so I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your patience and support!

Take care!

Whew, have I ever been busy with UC Web Creations in the past few months. I haven’t had time to even think about getting my CD available online again, but I haven’t forgotten!

I need your help, though. If you are one of my fans, I would really appreciate you leaving me a comment to let me know you’re around, or if you’d like to see more updates from me! I’m also going to look into the option of having my music available on iTunes – let me know if that would interest you as well! I’m still exploring options for the CD – I had decided to use the solution I had a few years ago, but they’re a little pricey, and being an independent artist who works a full-time job and does freelance blog design on the side to pay the bills, I really have to be careful with costs.

Also, tell me what your favorite composition is! Don’t forget, you can listen to my music online by visiting the music page!

Well, there’s my mini-update for now!

Take care!

It’s definitely not easy being an independent artist and working a “normal” full-time day job, and doing freelance work on the side. Finding the time (and inspiration) to compose music has been my biggest challenge over the past five years, but I do have a few new things on the go. Completing them is a whole different story, though.

I have searched high and low for the best solution for me to re-release an updated version of my music CD through an inexpensive CD replication and/or duplication service, and haven’t found anything that works with my limited budget, so I’m considering going back to CafePress. I’d like to re-release my CD, and it will include all of my completed compositions, including a bonus Christmas track which I’ve never included before, and “A Lifetime Together”, which is the piece I composed as the processional for my own wedding, but I still need to find a viable solution.

Anyway, I know I have a few loyal fans and wanted to let you guys know!

My music can currently be heard via my Music page (streaming mp3′s). If you’ve never heard any of my pieces, please go there and at least listen to either “A Lifetime Together” or “The First Noel” (if you’d rather hear something more familiar and don’t mind listening to Christmas music) to get a feel for my style of music when it comes to my instrumental pieces.

Now, here is my question that I would LOVE to know the answer to:

Which one is your favorite piece?

Mine is “A Lifetime Together”! (Come on, you knew I was going to say that!)

Part of the reason my music has been on hold over the past few years is that MIDI sequencing is a tedious effort and is time-consuming. It takes a bit of time to get the whole song in when you’re doing it one note at a time! Lately whenever I think of what’s involved in getting one of my compositions sequenced, I feel weary (from all my past experience) without even having started!

I use a program called Noteworthy Composer, and it’s relatively basic compared to some of the stuff available out there, but it’s done the job for me so far. You basically create a musical score, and if you’re like me and you don’t have a MIDI keyboard, you’ll have to put in each individual note manually.

Because I work a full-time “day” job, I really haven’t had the time to complete any additional music of late, but it doesn’t mean I don’t have ideas… when an idea comes, it’s usually when I’m tinkering on my piano, so I do make sure to record the idea as a wave file (.wav) so that in the future I can come back to it and try to get it sequenced and sounding as “real” as possible. I work with soundfonts, and am always on the hunt for realistic sounding instruments.

Something I’ve started researching recently is Cubase (Steinberg) and Sonar (Cakewalk). I think I want to be able to take things to the next level as one of the things that frustrates me is my inability to get a drum track down. I hear drum loops in some of my recent musical “ideas”, but I’m not a drummer, and laying down a drum track manually with Noteworthy just doesn’t work that well. If you have an opinion, by all means leave a comment! I’m going to be searching YouTube videos that talk about Sonar and Cubase and see if that helps me make my “final” decision, and at the moment I think I’m leaning towards Sonar, but the problem is I would like whatever I choose to have the same scoring ability that Noteworthy provides, and so far I haven’t been able to discover whether they do or not… although I suppose it may not be that big a deal, since Noteworthy exports to the MIDI format (.mid), and I believe you can import .mid files into both Cubase and Sonar…

When I do finally decide on one and get it, I’m hoping the learning curve won’t be very long, and I’m also hoping the software itself and what it offers will inspire me to take the time and get down some tracks so I can post some newer compositions. We’ll see how that goes!

I’ve been so busy working on my web design website, UC Web Creations, web & blog design clients, as well as my “day job”, that I really haven’t had the time to update this site like I’ve wanted!

Well, today, I sucked it up and finally did it! I changed the theme altogether to something that represented the musical/artistic side of me, and I updated a few different sections, including posting the rest of my music! They’re back, and you can listen to them all!

Now, if I could just find the time to work on some new music – I have tons of little snip bits here and there that need to be expanded on… I’m waiting for the inspiration to hit me hard enough to get them going.

There you have it! Feel free to leave me comments, either in my blog section, or via the Contact Form!

I really should get myself to bed – have an early morning, and singing on the worship team tomorrow at my church!

After that, I have some websites to work on – for a friend, and for a Christian ministry of which I am part.

The site is going through even more of an overhaul, but this time I believe it will be a permanent change. I will continue to update the site probably during this week, and once it’s done, I’ll be able to start concentrate more on the actual content of the site. For now, I’m still working on the back end stuff!

I’ve been having to rethink this site a bit, especially with regards to what I want on the site itself. It was under maintenance for a while due to my “rethinking” period, but now it’s back up and running. I will make changes as necessary as time goes on, and will be slowly re-posting my music again, along with whatever else comes to my mind, but for now I’m just happy to have it back online! Thanks for dropping by!

I’ve re-posted “A Lifetime Together”. To hear it, go to the music page! Now I have to get to bed – morning comes quickly, and another work day is ahead… if only this was my day job, but alas, it isn’t, so when I have the spare time, I update what I can… good night!