Music by Christopher Goodman

Learn more about my projects, tools, and qualifications in my Professional Information section.

Contact me if you like what you hear!

mp3s

Art Music | Rock and Pop | Jazz | top

Art Music

  1. To Heaven and Back - This piece shows my skill with analog synthesizers and tape - the vast majority of the piece was done using a Moog synthesizer, a Buchla synthesizer, and a Scully reel to reel four track tape machine. I also play my trumpet in this one - see if you can figure out where.
  2. Pondering Wandering - This piece was composed within Max, a graphic programming environment available on the Macintosh. Basically there is a duet between me and the computer. The sounds are from my Ensoniq ESQ1.
  3. When I Steel Away - This is my only recording thus far on which I play the pedal steel guitar (with some heavy effects on it). There is some custom synth programming (analog and digital), too. Everything was assembled in a computer DAW (I think Deck, but it might have been ProTools).
  4. The Transfiguration of Christ - Here are some excerpts from my Senior Recital, The Transfiguration of Christ. It's rather ambient, but it keeps moving. The actual recital had music like this through out, but also had some live vocal performances and an original hymn with pipe organ accompaniment.
  5. Diamonds and Clay - This is a rough assemblage of elements from my first "walk through" piece, a form I developed in a Private Reading in college. The idea is that there are several speakers in a hallway, or in a room, or along a pathway, and then people walk from one section of the piece to the next. There is (or can be) a definite progression, but the piece progresses through space much more so than time because people can spend as much time at any section as they desire. They can even go in reverse order. Needless to say, an "assemblage" recording doesn't quite do justice to the idea, but it is an approximation.

Art Music | Rock and Pop | Jazz | top

Rock and Pop

  1. Hallelujah - This is a song by my band, Tattered Hat. Toshio Mana wrote pretty much all of the lyrics and most of the music. I was the keyboard (piano) player, recording engineer, and co-producer (but you can't really appreciate the engineering part because of the mp3 format - Oh well!).
  2. Stolen - Another Tattered Hat Song, with lyrics by Toshio. The music was a bit more collaborative. This is a decent example of me playing organ.
  3. Another Game - off of the CD, Oberlin Pop. I wrote, recorded, and performed all the music except for the vocals and lyrics.

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Jazz

  1. The Chicken - Blue Lotus Quintet, my jazz quintet for my first 6 months in El Paso - This is a Jaco Pastorius tune that we loved playing. The Blue Lotus Quintet still kind of exists in a nebulous form with different leads, but our two founding horn players have moved away from El Paso (PCSed, in Army terminology). This and the other tracks by Blue Lotus were recorded by Nate DeRusha, our bass player, on a minidisk recorder live at El Paso Loco, formerly known as Jamocha's, the coffee house we frequented. I've further compressed them to fit on my site.
  2. Mr. P. C. - Blue Lotus Quintet - a straight ahead Coltrane tune
  3. Alone Together - Blue Lotus Quintet - a nice ballad for variety...
  4. My Favorite Things - Blue Lotus Quintet - One of our more heavily planned pieces, this standard contains and combines ideas from various recorded versions the different members liked.
  5. Island of Engle's Elves - Blue Lotus Quintet - This is a free jazz piece written by our Trombone player, Stephen Kirkpatrick.
  6. The Love We Imagined - OK, so this is marginally a Jazz tune, and I'll probably move it once I record the vocals. But it is one of my rare pieces in which I wrote, played, and recorded everything solely by myself alone. (Redundantly clear?)

Art Music | Rock and Pop | Jazz | top


Scores

You may need to download the Scorch Plug in to see these files.

Lost Love Songs

More therapy than an attempt at great art, these are the songs I wrote in relation to an old love that went sour. I used them to get used to the notation program Sibelius since I primarily used Finale before for such purposes. That said, The Love We Imagined(available above as an mp3 instrumental), Blue Eyes, and Time Heals turned out pretty well - listen to them if you don't have time for the whole thing. The songs are listed below in roughly the order in which they should be listened. All is original in these; yes these are even my attempts at lyric writing. But most of these were written fairly fast, usually in an evening or two. I've gone back to polish some of the better ones, such as The Love We Imagined.

  1. Unbroken - I originally wrote this music for a different set of lyrics (by someone else), but thought I'd try to write some new lyrics in order to use this as an introductory piece.
  2. Stayin' Up Late - The actual love song that I wrote especially for the girl in subject, although over the years I've changed some chords.
  3. You're My Need - This was the song that I wrote in order to propose to her. It is primarily unchanged, although I originally worked it out on guitar. Thankfully, she never heard it. It has a kind of naivety to it, or maybe immaturity; kind of like that love affair.
  4. The Love We Imagined - Written years later, but imagined as how she must have felt at the time.
  5. Real True Love - Written during the months when she was questioning continuing the relationship.
  6. It Takes One - Really sad! Self-pity is a terrible thing. Imagine a country tear jerker. Thankfully I am rarely in that bad of a mood.
  7. Time Heals - Written about a year after the break up. I like this one a lot, although I'm not sure about its overall quality.
  8. Blue Eyes - The first half of this piece was written as a composition exercise in college, without words. As I've played it over the years, I've added different words in my head to help remember it (a common memorization technique for me), and usually improvised different B sections. I finished the B section in January 2005, and worked out the kinks in the A section lyrics a few months before. This song really says more about how I currently feel about this particular relationship, which lasted almost four years but ended several years ago. Basically, I'm fine as long as I don't think about it.