Music, Art & Engineering
Several years in the making, Drop Dead Sunset is a five piece hard rock group based in Nashville, TN. The material emerged primarily from demos Ernie Gray wrote from 2017-2020 that the band then collaborated and expanded on. We made several attempts to record the material, finally opting to work with producer Geoff Piller at Electric Thunder … Continue reading Drop Dead Sunset EP
Produced by Ernie Gray November 29-30, 2019 Timecode Reference: 00:00 – i. V.H.Essen Theme00:07 – ii. The Constant Drone Of Success04:13 – iii. Losing Your Shadow In The Rain08:28 – iv. Taking A Soft Target By Force12:14 – v. All You Ever Think AboutTotal run time: 16:04 Download Written, recorded mixed and mastered over Thanksgiving … Continue reading R1NG$ EP
Supermoon is a new live set in the ongoing series featuring longtime collaborator, experimental guitarist, Joey Campbell and jazz percussionist John Westberry. John Westberry met Joey and I for the first time during this session, booked in the evening of the historic Supermoon on November 14th, 2016. An exceptional musician, John brings a dynamic linear style that challenges and … Continue reading New Live Set: Campbell Gray Westberry – Supermoon
This track was written and recorded in 2011 using mostly minimalist soft synths and drum machines in an early version of Reason. Vacations In Color is an ongoing solo project combining rock, R&B and synthpop.
Vacations In Color is an ongoing solo project I’ve been working on since 2012. Automatic Ecstasy was recorded during the summer of 2012 as an ode to electronic instruments and the Electropop/Synthpop singles that I loved during the early 2000s. True to the tradition, it was composed using simple soft synths and drum machines in … Continue reading New Track: Automatic Ecstasy
Brian Shulman is a business colleague and friend who’s been a profound influence in my life both professionally, as a software innovator and businessman, and personally, as a mentor of tremendous character. Brian is not involved in the music industry himself, but I was fascinated to learn about his late father, Stan Shulman, who was … Continue reading Interview: Brian Shulman on music pioneer and businessman, Stan Shulman
A colleague recently told me about an interesting interview he read with Ed Catmull, who just published a book on Pixar. One of the key insights was that he observed how poor management allows organization to smother the creative genius of important company talent. I’ve been fortunate, and intentional enough to avoid traditional organizational structures … Continue reading Zen Business & Creativity (Or six ways to die as a creative)
Moore’s law is a curse. In 2005 I built yet another computer in a long line of homebrew PCs. I don’t recall the exact specs, but it was a single core Pentium4 with about 1GB of initial RAM. The computer ran an optimized XP operating system, surfed the web at light speed using Firefox with … Continue reading Trimming the Bloat: A Dearth of Elegant Code
After years of research and development my teammates and I at LTS Education Systems are proud to launch the all new tablet-compatible learning platform, Stride Academy. Built on the latest HTML5 technology, Stride Academy is a giant leap forward in terms of user experience and front-end flexibility from the previous flagship product, Kid’s College. With … Continue reading Stride Academy Adaptive Online Learning Software
About eight years ago, I started to notice a bizarre phenomenon. I was paid by people to make things look “professional,” yet I repeatedly noticed that consumers were suspicious or oblivious to much of the visual language that was established by the past century of professional ad design. I looked around for some theorist to … Continue reading Professional Advertising Is Dead. Long Live Advertising.
Jumping off of bridges, wearing your pants below your underwear, investing in any stock with a .com in the name, credit default swaps, the atkins diet, asking people to follow their business on facebook out of nowhere — there are a lot of things that people do in great numbers because everyone else is doing … Continue reading Social Media Marketing Genius In Ten Minutes
I was never much of an athlete. I recall an episode around 1982 where dad bought me a glove, took me out to toss the ball around in the big backyard where all the neighbors could see. It didn’t go very well. The glove was heavy for my diminutive frame and the ball ended up making more … Continue reading Coaching As Service
As an on-again off-again meditator for years, I’ve often suggested the ancient art of “sitting still and doing nothing” to my friends and associates. The most common reply is that either they don’t know where to start, or have tried it and found it difficult or pointless. Recent scientific research has laid to rest any … Continue reading Meditation Makes You Better
Lawrence looked Jenny straight in the eye and said, “One of the big advantages of using our company is that we perform Search Engine Optimization on our websites.” “What is that?” Jenny asked. “It’s a process of optimizing your website’s code so that it performs better on search and ranks higher,” says Lawrence. “Oh that … Continue reading The Revenge Of Scientific Marketing
The biggest challenge for businesses of all types these days is greater competition for dwindling market share. Unless you have a completely exclusive product or service that has an uncontested monopoly, you probably find yourself having to take less for what you sell. As a friend said during lunch the other day, “people just aren’t … Continue reading To The Maverick Go The Spoils