About him.
Who the hell are you talking about? Who's that "Duke"?
Patrick "The Duke" always had a major passion from his child days on: Listening to music.
At the age of 14, he started to build computers and sell them. At the age of 17, he had first contact with the possibilities of creating music on a computer. At that time he built one model especially for semi-professional musicians, which got him a technology award in a German computer magazine.
It was the time when Cakewalk and Cubase were in their early days and pioneered in audio recording and MIDI sequencing. He played around with them and had much fun creating first simple tracks and remixes.
Then he had to decide which field to choose to develop his adult career. He committed himself 100% to IT, so music creation lost out. For quite some time.
But in 2019, after 25 years of rockin' the IT for different employers in Southern Germany, raising a self-employed business alongside, traveling all over the world, building a house and a garden, growing a family, doing medieval sword fighting, there was still something... missing.
Being a big fan of two forms of art (movies and music) Patrick felt something growing inside that had to be expressed. Some call it a midlife crisis, he called it his "new project".
So in 2019 he decided to learn to play the electric guitar. He just wanted to be able to play some of the favourite tunes of his beloved artists, to mention only few: Devin Townsend, Slowdive or The Gathering. Who are all part of his musical influences and great motivators of learning guitar skills.
Soon that wasn't enough and there was the desire to not only play but also record the newly learned riffs. Perhaps some self created tunes would come up, waiting to be preserved for the opinions of some friends? No one could tell. But how to do that?
Being an IT guy it soon went clear that the solution would direct to the computer. After absorbing what's needed (an audio interface, a DAW software), Patrick stumbled upon completely unknown things, like sampled virtual instruments, that give everyone who is willing to learn (much!) the possibility to produce fully orchestrated music. Which untrained ears cannot even distinguish from hand-played music, only professionals can tell the difference (if it is done right).
After he realized, that all major artists of our days work that way, from film composers like Hans Zimmer, Tom Holkenberg or Harry Gregson-Williams (some other influences in addition to the above) over to the aforementioned heavy music artist Devin Townsend, suddenly all kinds of musical ideas quarried out, that had been in the background all the time. That was the way to go! The loop was closed and the "new project" began to fill every minute of his time not being coated with work or family or friends.
The Duke established a fully equipped home music studio with a lot of microphones, instruments and all that stuff. To build up everything that's needed to create compositions in many different genres as he's not tied to a single direction.
Of course one must know that the mentioned artists above only compose their music on the computer as mockups. The difference between them and the "One-Man-Show" is, that they have a band or a whole orchestra and big studios at their hand who can then record their mockups. The so-called "bedroom composer" doesn't have the resources to afford that (yet). Of course.
But the fundamentals are the same for all of them and in reach of everyone. And the more skills are willing to be developed, the more the level of these professionals could be approached.
To give you an imagination of the competences that had to be developed and are still in progress, mostly by self-study, here are some of them:
- Play actual instruments
(Patrick tries to restrict himself to five: the guitar, the piano, the pipe organ, the Taiko drum, other percussion)
- Using a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation)
- General Composition
- Music Theory
- Harmony
- Arrangement/Instrumentation/Orchestration
- Sound Design
- MIDI-Programming
- Recording, Mixing, Mastering
- Copyright
- Publishing
- Marketing
When you read these lines, it marks the achievement of at least some of those skills at a level that caught your interest.
Wow, thank you! That's amazing!
In 2019, when he started with just one semi-hollow guitar and a small amp, no one could ever imagine that. Be sure, Patrick is very delighted by your attention. "The Duke Creates" is born. Now it's up to you if you wanna be part of it.
Whether you like epic orchestral music, earth shattering subbasses, heavy and dark guitars, soft and dreamy ambiences or the combination of all that, gladly spiced up with exotics. The Duke loves everything that can produce pleasing sounds. From Alphorn to Zither. From Cimbasso to Santur. From small wind chimes being played by the air in his garden to the biggest pipe organ being driven by a huge pump station able to create sounds down to 16 Hz, that amount to an earthquake. It should all become melted into tasteful music. Hopefully you have as much fun listening as he has with creating.
Sometimes inspiration comes best in nature. Field Recording is not the last thing The Duke likes to do, perhaps you find some of his recorded material inside the music. So it's not unlikely to come across him composing or recording on one of the green and woody hills in his neighbourhood, sitting with his mobile studio (roughly consisting of a notebook, headphones, surround microphone and keyboard) while having a great view to the horizon, greeting foxes and deers that pass by from time to time.
What comes up next? Maybe a combination of a pipe organ with Taiko drums? Or a Celesta together with church bells and an epic choir? Or heavy guitars connecting with angelic harps?
Be surprised!
And now psst... can you hear it?
The Duke Creates
