Today we’d like to introduce you to Tom Aldridge.
Hi Tom, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I’ve played music all in some form or another for all my life, mostly guitar, but also cello and piano. Having played in some bands in my twenties to little success, I became disillusioned with the idea of playing music as a career and went back to school and started a family. The music itch never left me, and I began experimenting with electronic music. Over time, I gathered equipment with the goal of creating a live production rig that could utilize live looping to create music effortlessly and with as near-to-zero latency as I can achieve. Recently, I had the thought to combine my love of Dungeons & Dragons and dark fantasy aesthetics with my music, and settled on the character of the Mystic Tom Solomon, who travels around this fantasy world of Amarose in his Mystic MIDI Caravan, playing music and going on adventures. This, in turn, rekindled my love of creative writing, and I’ve also begun a soundbeingmusic tumblr with an ongoing narrative featuring Tom and a couple of his adventuring buddies. I have further exciting plans regarding a live setup that I’m still planning and funding that will hopefully enable me to take this crazy idea on the road!
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It hasn’t been a smooth road, but it’s been a fun one! Playing music, creating music, recording music, there’s not one single part of it that is unenjoyable to me. Promoting and distributing my music on the other hand, not so much fun. Money has always been tight, but I’m thankfully in a part of my life where I’m not struggling like I used to. I have a full time job, an amazing wife, and three incredible children.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I utilize a combination of MIDI controllers, mics, and live instruments to facilitate a sort of live looping music creation station, all run through Ableton Live, a digital audio workstation. I use a scene launcher controller for a sort of overall view of all the different parts of a song, used mainly while recording. I have a MIDI foot controller that I can use to launch scenes when my hands are busy performing live. As for live audio, I have everything running through an audio interface as close to zero latency as I can afford. Guitar and a tongue drum are my heaviest used live instruments, but I occasionally will use a kalimba, cajon, various percussion elements, or my voice. Any other instrumentation is digital, and I have three dedicated MIDI controllers for those: one for bass, one for keys/pads, and one for drums and percussion. Having long had a love of creative writing and fantasy worlds like Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons, I decided to learn a little about video editing and began crafting audio/visual/narrative microstories about a wizard, Tom Solomon, in a fantasy world. You can find these music videos on many number of social media platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, among many others. This then inspired me to also create a Tumblr blog chronicling a more in-depth story about this wizard character. While the music videos are meant to be short glimpses into various points of this character’s life or the world he exists within, the long-form blog posts give me an opportunity to create a more cohesive narrative in a serialized form, a story that never necessarily needs to end, and that I can come back to continue whenever I have free time. Originally I had been interested in using AI to help me create the video elements, but it was just too clunky and time-consuming to get good results, not to mention that I felt disingenuous using it to create my art. All of the video elements in my work are free-to-use stock footage, edited in InShot. I never was much of a visual artist, so I’ve been taking some online classes for animation and 3D modeling to see if maybe I could get into creating my own visuals one day.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Don’t waste your time. Be present in the moment. Be true to yourself and your vision, no matter how absurd it may appear to others. Learn something from everyone. Always be evolving and learning. Specifically for creating music, I typically keep 3 things in mind, things that I’ve found to be major elements throughout the music that I love the most. I figure if you can have at least 2 of these 3 things in your song, you’re set.
1) Simple, relatable lyrics (or in my case, written narratives) that can make the listener/reader really ponder.
2) A really good beat and rhythm section that gets the bootys shaking and the heads nodding
3) ear candy elements, the kinds of things that give the listener goosebumps (the “eargasm”… a solid guitar solo with a slick tone, a synth arpeggio that feels like it’s launching into space, a snare roll or crash that enunciates a certain part or end of a section of the song, something simple you look forward to in the song or you always find yourself air drumming or miming playing
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/soundbeingmusic
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sound_being_music/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/soundbeingmusic/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@soundbeingmusic?si=WAoevYHYHQvgwjSN
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/soundbeingmusic
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@soundbeingmusic
