I’ve mentioned Griffin’s interest in musical composition in a previous post, but I haven’t shared many examples of his other creative outlet: art. He spends much of his free time creating pixel art and composing music for various video game projects. (Indeed, he has just confirmed his first paid commission!) Here’s a sampling of some things he has been working on recently.
And here are a few of his recent compositions:
Griffin has been taking music lessons for a few years—first piano and then trombone. He plays in the jazz band at school and is improving rapidly. Along the way, he has become interested in composing music. With easy, free electronic tools like BeepBox, he is able to develop electronic compositions pretty easily. Sarah and I have been quite impressed with what he’s been working on. This summer, he’s hoping to enroll in a music theory class at the Saint Paul Conservatory of Music.
This is his most recent composition, completed this morning:
And here are links to a bunch of other pieces he’s been working on over the past few months, at various levels of completion. Some of them are just for fun. Others were composed to fill particular needs in his video game coding projects.
Griffin and his friend, James (and a few other friends), dove into a programming contest last week: the New Year, New Skills Game Jam. The contest ran for exactly one week, from January 7 to 14. They worked hard and developed a prototype game called Wyre. James was the lead coder and Griffin composed the music and designed many of the graphics.
You can play the game here and see the contest submission here. A few screenshots posted below.
Congratulations Griffin and James! This took a lot of work to put together.
Sarah, Maggie, Griffin, and I went back to the fair on Tuesday evening for the Brandi Carlisle concert in the grandstand. It was Griffin and Maggie’s first big concert, and Brandi set the bar pretty high. It was a phenomenal show.
Griffin has been taking a piano for a few years. This year he started learning the trombone as part of the music program at St. Paul Academy. He played in his first concert this evening. He sounded good and, more importantly, had a great time.
The beginners joined the full band for two pieces. Griffin is on the rightmost bottom seat in the two videos below.
Griffin has been taking weekly piano lessons at the Walker West Music Academy since February of 2019. He had a few lessons in person and then, as the state locked down for COVID-19 in mid-March, started doing them remotely via Skype. He had his first recital yesterday evening; it was a virtual event where he played “Oh! Susanna.” One fun element of the virtual format was that friends and relatives from around the country could attend. We hope that he will get a chance to do more of these. See below for a trimmed video of Griffin’s portion of the recital. Listen for Oliver who makes an unintended cameo part-way through.
The full recital is available on YouTube. The audio gets a bit funky due to the streaming, but it’s fun to see all the different kids at different levels of skill.
“Daddy, I like this song because it reminds me of all the fun times I’ve had in my life!” — Griffin
Adorable!
Until you listen to the lyrics. The song is Pumped Up Kicks by Foster the People and it’s “written from the perspective of a troubled and delusional youth with homicidal thought,” according to Wikipedia.
Here’s the chorus:
All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You better run, better run, outrun my gun
All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
You better run, better run, faster than my bullet
Fortunately, a bit of further investigation revealed that Griffin hasn’t a clue what the lyrics are about. When I nervously asked him why it reminds him of fun times, he looked up with a big grin and said, “it just sounds so happy!”
The ultimate irony here is that I am exactly the same way. I only figured out what the song was about when I started writing this post — after listening to it with Griffin a few times — and thought I’d better look up the lyrics to make sure it wasn’t filled with profanity.
Music can be tough with our kids. Some children’s music is hard to listen to as an adult. And Griffin and Maggie both like to repeat songs endlessly, bludgeoning even great songs to death. They are also mercurial, wanting to switch songs, bands, and genres repeatedly, and always wanting to control it. My answer to this has been Pandora.
At first the kids were disappointed when I put it on, because they couldn’t make requests. For those that don’t use Pandora, it basically generates playlists based on some musical seeds that you create, but you can’t request individual songs. As you listen you can fine tune the station. I created a station for Griffin, called simply “Griffin Music,” seeded it with some songs that he liked, and then showed him how to use the “Thumbs Up” and “Thumbs Down” feature to mark songs that he liked or didn’t like. After he got used to this, he loved it. (Of course Sarah and I could also go in and “Thumbs Down” songs that drove us nuts.)
While glancing over the station details recently, I was shocked to see how many tracks Griffin (and Maggie, to some degree) had marked. We launched the “Griffin Music” station in 2011. Since then we’ve added nine seed tracks. Griffin has thumbed-up 228 tracks and thumbed-down 21. Read on if you’d like to actually see those lists, a snapshot of Griffin’s musical taste over the past few years. These lists are current as of November 17, 2015, and are sorted in reverse chronological order.
Continue reading Griffin Music
Mind-boggling Eels concert at the Fitzgerald Theater tonight. Mark Oliver Everett and the band were in top form. As I giddily posted to facebook afterwards, “Eels were SO good. I’d rank this in my top five lifetime shows. Stunning performance. We got Grace Kelly Blues AND Last Stop This Town. (Two favorite songs.) Along with a lot of great numbers from the latest album. Joy. Rapture.”
But that was only the beginning. After the second encore, Everett invites none other than Steve Perry (Journey!) on stage for his first public performance in 20 years. Unbelievable. A few pictures borrowed from the internet (my phone didn’t hold up) followed by a video of the Steve Perry encore:
