Well it seems like summer took its sweet time arriving this year, at least where I live. But it feels like it’s finally here now, and I’m more than ready for that. With pandemic restrictions easing at the moment, I’m looking forward to a few nice summer road trips and enjoying the outdoors. The long, wet, and grey winter/spring has given me plenty of opportunity to work on my music projects, and so I’m happy to announce that I have a new single coming out on July 15/22! It’s called “The Lowdown” – I hope you’ll check it out!
Happy New Year, and a new single too!
Well, let me start by saying that I wish every single one of you reading this all the very best for 2022! The global pandemic seems to be dragging on without a clear conclusion in sight at the moment, so I guess we’ll need to keep hunkered down to some extent or another for a while longer.
In 2021, I had my head deeply in my music projects as much as real life would allow. However, I struggled with worsening TMJ disorder this year as well – an unfortunate byproduct of a (necessary) dental surgery I had almost 3 years ago. Unfortunately the symptoms this brings make it very uncomfortable to play saxophone and sing, amongst other things. So I really had to accept this situation this year and adapt to it by working on other aspects of my projects and writing new material, while starting a series of TMJ treatments that will hopefully alleviate my symptoms by the first quarter of 2022.
With that said, I did release a new single on New Year’s Eve 2021! Titled “Spitfire (Termagant)“, it’s a very quirky, tongue-in-cheek pop/rock song about life’s more challenging relationships. As I’m typing this, I’m working on this song’s accompanying music video, which I will release ASAP.
That’s all I’ve got for now – I’ll post another update soon! 🙂
A long overdue blog update!
Wow! I can’t believe I haven’t updated this blog more recently, but I guess my time is being distributed across more social platforms these days. And besides that, a LOT has changed for me these past few years.
Big changes
Let’s see…where to start? Oh yeah, my partner and I moved cities from beautiful Victoria, British Columbia to a smaller community on Vancouver Island in 2017. We were ready to look for our first home together and decided it was the perfect time to move to a smaller community and a home with enough space for our long-term plans.
Next came 6 months of various home renovations, particularly including the build of my professionally designed, converted-bedroom music production studio.
Finding inspiration
While home renovations were going on, I tried to spend a lot of time outdoors exploring with my camera. Some of my favourite photos are now also available for licensing at the Adobe Stock website.
Love and marriage
Once things settled down from the renovations, my partner and I decided to get married!!! Woohoo!!! 🙂
Creative immersion
After getting used to the new studio space and dialing it in to my liking, the winter of 2019 was the beginning of a long period of me being in the creative flow zone. Endless hours with seemingly boundless energy in the studio went on for months, as I laid the foundations for what I planned to be Rainer Willeke Music‘s first album.
Then the global pandemic came, which caused me to rethink my album plans and find alternate ways to get album guests to provide their performances via remote methods, rather than in person. In 2020 I spent an unprecedented (for me) amount of time working on my songs and accompanying music videos and at this point have released 3 of them, with more coming very soon.
New releases
My first released single, Still, No Rain, was the first track I released that included remote performances from both old and new musical friends, including featured vocalist Ken Ermter, who also co-wrote the lyrics.
My next release, entitled You…, is an emotional and dynamic Indie pop rock track with jazzy elements, evoking feelings of love, loss, and longing.
And my most recent release, Sunrise, is an Indie pop chillwave style track with a light and breezy feel, infectious groove, and more jazzy saxophone elements.
I’m still working on the final production elements for the remaining songs in this project, with the next releases coming very soon!
Putting it out there
You can stream my music on Spotify, watch my videos on YouTube, and you can follow me on most social media channels – please visit RainerWillekeMusic.com for all my social links.
P.S. I’ll try to post a blog update a little sooner next time! 🙂
Studio upgrades, writing, recording…
Hi everyone! Well I’ve been on a mission for quite a while now to upgrade my studio’s recording and playback equipment and to improve my mixing environment. New monitors, controllers, mics, preamps, converters, etc. I’ve always found that learning new gear, although it can slow you down a bit initially, can lead to the discovery of new musical ideas! I’m working on a wide variety of original pieces, getting closer to a finished product every day! Here’s a quick snap of the state of my mission control tonight.
I have a few more hardware controllers arriving this week which will complete my new setup (for now). I promise I will post some new music soon! 🙂