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I welcome your comments my realizations, and am happy to answer any questions about the music, the production methods, or my CDs. Feel free to email me!
If you enjoy the MP3s on this site, I greatly appreciate your donation and/or CD orders. Visit my online store to donate or order via PayPal.
I absolutely will not send your ordering information to any third party, and I will not spam your inbox with "news" about this site. If you want to keep up with what I've uploaded, I announce it at my blog, and the RSS feed will keep you informed.
Unless explicitly noted otherwise, everything on this site is under copyright. You may download the clips for personal use, but please email me for permission to use or redistribute them in any other way.
Music that you may use as you wish is clearly indicated on the web page for the work with the appropriate Creative Commons license.
All ragtime available as an MP3 or for sale on the CD is copyrighted and is listed with BMI, and public performance requires a BMI performance rights license appropriate to the venue.
Yamaha S-80 synthesizer [88 key, piano touch, 16 part / 64 voice]
Roland A-37 MIDI controller [76 key, piano touch]
Edirol SD-90 sound module [32 part, 128 voice]
Roland XV-2020 sound module
Roland Complete Orchestra SRX-06 and Ultimate keys SRX-07 expansion cards [16/64]
EWQLSO Complete orchestra Silver edition softsynth
Lexicon MX-200 effects processor
Behringer Ultrafex EX3200 multiband sound enhancement processor
Tascam FW-1884 firewire audio interface
Tapco S-5 nearfield studio monitors
Ultrasone HFI-650 headphones
Cakewalk Sonar 4 Producer Edition
Cakewalk Pyro 2004
Finale 2000b
I started taking piano lessons at age 10 in 1974. By chance, this coincided with the ragtime revival that accompanied the release of the Oscar-winning movie The Sting, and within a year I was exploring the beautiful music of Scott Joplin. At my piano recital at age 11, I started off with Muzio Clementi's endlessly overplayed Sonatina in C, and then went on to what I really wanted to play -- a sprightly little dance tune called Maple Leaf Rag. Scott Joplin, Joseph F. Lamb, James Scott, and many others have been an inspiration ever since.
I wrote my first original ragtime piano piece, Fenway Rag, at 12, and have written about 20 rags since then. Some of them have been entered in contests, and have won prizes at local, state, and national levels. My 1978 White Cat Rag won first place in a Virginia state composition contest for high schoolers, and most recently, my 1995 Flag Rag placed sixth (out of about 100 entrants) in an online composition and production contest. So finally, some 30 years after writing my first rag, I'm getting around to scoring them nicely, producing audio masters of them with my home studio, and making them generally available. A CD of my original ragtime is available for purchase on this site.
Besides Joplin's piano rags, I grew up listening first to the 32 piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, and later the organ works of J. S. Bach. These works are still among my favorite parts of the repertoire, and led me to take many years of organ lessons. For this reason, I spend a lot of time on music other than ragtime, and you'll find some of my MP3s on the Clips page. Some of these classical works I've scored in an "authentic" way, while I'm giving others a more modern twist that will probably make purists gag, but which I rather enjoy.
All text and audio on this site © 2007-2008 Jeffrey C. Hall |