I found that when I turned myself towards music, I felt like my performance was frustrating me because I would sit there and I wouldn't practice for weeks and then I'd come in and I'd want to be able to play like I remember playing and I couldn't. I wanted to be able to sing like I remember I could sing and I couldn't.

I had been hanging around Musical U for three or four years. And the Next Level program came up and I just said "Well, I just retired. This is for me." So I signed up. And it was quite a journey. 

There was always something creative about what I wanted to do with music that I had never explored, and I wanted to get into it. 

The thing was, I didn't even really know what I had in there wanting to come out until I was a few months into the Next Level program, which surprised not only me, but it surprised my coach at the Next Level as well.

I had started off wanting to dive into performance of jazz and vocal things. And I wanted to work on a crooning style of singing. And immediately I found that boy, your intonation stinks, Scott. You're not hitting the notes. You're getting lost in that. 

And at the same time in the Next Level collaboration stuff, I was sharing with people these things I was making up, these little compositions and some of the folks were like "yeah, that's nice." "That's cool, Scott." "That's very pretty." "That's really nice."...   — "Yeah, but I wish I could sing!"  Y'know I'm working on this singing, and it's driving me crazy. 

I had always loved classical music. I always sat around it. But when I started actually pulling up on my computer, a virtual orchestra being able to play any instrument on my keyboard and making it sound like, I'm composing orchestral music, I did a drop-jaw because some of my very favorite things were even in media studies were people like Max Steiner and John Williams who wrote these scores for classic movies. And I always thought it was just so cool how they did that. And I just... I just... It, it just seemed like it was me. It just was what I do. It just seemed so comfortable for me.

And then I started working on this ostinato, I remember doing this piano ostinato and it was an F minor sustained fourth chord that just went, four notes over and over again.

And then as I played that I heard this, on one of my virtual orchestral programs, I pulled up this English horn and I had it on the setting and I started to play it on the keyboard and I was just playing like a minor pentatonic off of this F minor sustained chord ostinato, and it just flowed.

It just came beautifully out of me. And being a guitar player who's played blues rock and blues and jazz just the tone and the timbre of this instrument just blew me away. It's. oh man, that thing is just hitting so much deep emotion. 

And at the time I was and still am kind of my mom's health was failing, getting ready for the worst with that. And feeling blue about that and my brother and sister and dealing with that also had some really hard things they were going through and helping them out. And this just captured that, and I was like feeling this, and it was - without thinking - it was coming out on the keyboard.

And, even I was like, "Ah!". 

So I recorded this, and "wow, I really like how that came out!" 

And, it's just all this stuff that just came unblocked. 

Where'd that come from? But it was in here, right? 

And it was so much fun to lose myself in that. And you look up and, oh man, three hours went by and where did that go?

And that was it. Ah, that's what I want to do. I knew right then and there. That's me. That's what I want to do. 

And so now I have this little highway I want to go down. And I have that now for the rest of what I want to do. 

And I'll tell you, if I hadn't popped into Next Level, I probably never would have discovered that way. 

What would I say to somebody who's ready to do this? 

First thing you've got to think about is, are you willing to turn yourself over and trust somebody to take you on a journey?

I'll tell you one thing, you might be thinking I'm a little worried that, I don't know, I don't want somebody to lead me. I didn't worry so much about that because I knew them. 

I can tell you that the folks at Musical U are great people and you can trust them for that. 

And they will push you. They will say, go in and do this. They will be on you, but you won't feel like it's the nasty piano teacher. They don't do mean things. They're very nice. They help you out. And if you don't want to do something, they will allow you not to do it. 

I think you'll find that they'll take you through things that you really didn't know you had in you and you'll discover some things. One thing that I think you'll discover that I found I did is that there is a connection that you can make between what you're thinking musically and what comes out from your hands or from your mouth that you'll be surprised that you'll make a connection that you will feel that you didn't have before.

If you had asked me a year ago or told me that I would be programming virtual orchestral music and learning, relearning musical notation and all of that, I would have said "what are you talking about?!" 

And here I am. 

And I'm actually singing Girl From Ipanema and hitting all the pitches too. So how about that!