I've been playing and recording my own music since the early 1980s. As a dedicated amateur you can't expect high quality recording or musicianship, but I've had a lot of fun over the years playing with friends in various groups. I tasted the bar scene a little bit and didn't like it, I'm much happier to get together at house parties or events to entertain. Most of my early music experiences were classical (on 'Cello) or for musicals. I got into heavier stuff when I took up the bass, and later the guitar. My current love for folk, Irish, and ancient music only developed slowly since the late 80s but I also carry along a fiddle these days.

The most recent group I recorded and played with is Bardic Circle which is an Irish folk group. The facebook page has been closed as of 2019, and the G+ page where I was keeping a list of tunes to work on disappeared with Google Plus. The old domain Tim had set up, bardiccircle.info, expired and we didn't renew it. The screenshot below is all that remains. Currently I run a private Discord server to coordinate on tunes with folks I play with.

To facilitate sessions I've been keeping a "Book of Song" for over 20 years. Eventually the book moved online and at some point I decided to format it as a book and have it printed (I used lulu. The first volume came out in 2009, then a second volume was created in 2011. In 2015 I released a second edition of Volume II with a bunch of new tunes. I hope to get around to making a second edition of Volume I some day because there are ton of great tunes in that one but its also shy on sheet music and thats a daunting amount of more work. I've been working on Volume III for almost 2 years now (2023) so hopefully I can knuckle down and get that done sometime soon. The domain http://www.bookofsong.com was intended to include all the tunes and errata and more but right now its just links to the books on lulu. These should be thought of as "workbooks", they are just collections of the tunes we were playing at the time in the form we did them with some of our notes. It was just less messy than photocopying all that stuff for everyone.

My tape collection of recorded stuff is quite large, though most of it is crap, frankly. As I would get together with folks over the years I've always tried to make a point of recording some of what we were doing because those magical times with different folks never last as long as we all would like. Usually when things start to fall apart its too late to get anything recorded! I would gather a bunch of tunes together at some point and create an album which I would "release" in the spirit of the mixed tapes of the 80s to everyone who had been involved and any friends that were interested. This practice started with tapes, shifted to CDs, and more recently has been a bunch of digital audio files.

I've added some pages for the various silly projects like this I've worked on over the years which are listed here.