I've been playing or making music in some fashion or another all of my life. Growing up, I played classical music on the piano and then trombone in the high school marching band.
I didn't continue with piano or trombone into college, and generally didn't do much music during those 5 (yes 5) years. In college however, I was able to DJ at the little college radio station that only played indie music which was super fun.
After college, with my piano and trombone skills mostly abandoned, I started picking up some strange instruments and dabbled with writing some of my own songs. In 2009 I picked up a cheap Tascam MF-P01 4-track cassette recorder, a ukulele, a stylophone, and an electric guitar. I didn't know how to play or use any of them! Nevertheless, my brother and I took up a challenge with one another to make a song a week in the month of December and then share the songs together. These songs were pretty terrible but it sparked a little something in me that hasn't gone away for the last 10+ years. I've slowly been acquiring lots of random musical toys and gear, thrown together some demos, and generally fiddled around with music creation in different software programs. Though it has taken quite some time, I finally have come to the point that I want to invest more time and energy into music that could be shared beyond my family and close friends.
I often get interested in all kinds of different facets of something, and music is no different. This makes focusing on any one interest difficult, and all these interests will often conflict with one another, just due to time limitations. I'd like to bring them together in a more cohesive whole, but most likely certain things will rise and fall as my focus shifts and I learn new things. Here's a list of current music-related stuff I like that I want to put some time into. (updated Jan 2021)
Over the years I've gotten into all kinds of other hobbies to varying degrees outside of music stuff. From time to time I may add another section here, but here's the most recent set of interests and hobbies I've been involved in.
Ben and Cheryl in 2020
I currently live up in the PNW with my wonderful wife Cheryl and my four great kids. We are starting to all make music together which is amazing and fun and poses all kinds of great challenges. My hope is that anything I can do musically now would be building blocks that my kids could stand on as they get older, if they want to do music at all.