*may or may not encompass months' worth of happenings

Speaking at the SoundGirls conference

On the evening GMT of 13 December 2025, I joined some friends – Rachel Garett Steele, Bonnie Bogovich, and Kelsey Mira – in delivering a talk about getting our vocals into games. It was called Studio to Score: Vocal Arranging Demystified. (The poster mentions two more friends, Laura Intravia and Jillian Aversa; sadly, they couldn't make the talk due to emergencies.)

(Yeah, there's a cheeky image of me behind the drums at Oyston Mill. The drums are not in shot lol)

It was a thorough talk, from what I remember; we covered various aspects of the process. How we got our vocals in games, how we were picked up by developers, what gear we use, what our recording and mixing process is, how we spoke with developers and what kind of direction we received from them with regards to the way we were to perform our vocals, contracts, licensing, the list goes on.

This is my first speaking credit. I may be mistaken, but I believe the others have spoken at a good few other conferences. Nonetheless, I'm happy to have been able to join these seasoned professionals in delivering insight into the world of game audio, and specifically from the perspective of a vocalist.

Choir directorship

Some of you may have known that in mid-2024 I started directing a kids' church choir in Longridge. I have since moved on from that position to direct a well-established church choir in Penwortham, starting 1 February 2026. I feel like I've stumbled onto them, because they are wonderful singers and they're eager for a challenge. I hope that I can give it to them and that they can feel real satisfaction from it. I'm truly blessed to be with them.

I introduced one of my own songs to the choir and the congregation a week and a bit back (this song is still in the process of being recorded, so I'm not dropping any hints from now). I was not expecting the amount of effusive praise I would get from the people around me for it. This has gotten the gears in my head turning.

These next couple weeks are going to be among the busiest for me: Holy Week and Easter are coming, and there is a LOT of preparation to do. Let's shine.

Harris Open exhibition

My local museum, the Harris Museum, relaunched its open art exhibition, the Harris Open, in February 2026. I am one of 500+ artists to feature there, and I submitted this moleskine journal entry.

If you happen to be able to visit the Harris Museum, my work is number 83, in one of the side rooms! The exhibition lasts until May 2026.

There was a lot of processing that went into this work. I've been mentally abysmal these last several months. At the time I penned the words that would become this art piece, I was struggling to find a way forward with my craft. Various industries have gone to shit, and there seemed (and still seems) to be less appetite for beautiful things in a world of poverty, austerity, hatred, and war. Many creatives I know feel like we're on the front lines of passive resistance, as do I. And I want to stress, that is a good thing in the face of this constant evil and darkness… and yet, we can't help but dream about what came before.

I didn't win any prizes (now why the fuck would I, lol). But I managed to inspire a child who loved comics and wanted to get into them, on the opening day of the exhibition. I've not been back since, at least not yet, and I hope to be back. I don't know what kind of reach this piece will have had since opening day.

Discoveries regarding games I'd scored

For the purposes of this paragraph and all discourse on the games I'd written music for, I use the phrase “shipped titles” to describe games that 1) are NOT jam games, and 2) have made it to storefronts, notably Steam and Google Play. Anything else is a bonus.

I discovered only yesterday that Glue Globs, the second ever shipped title I'd scored, has had 50,000 downloads. For an indie mobile game, this is not bad whatsoever. Honestly, I didn't know what kind of reach the game would have; it looks like it has gone far further than I had imagined.

Today, I found out that the opening trailer of yuri visual novel Bittersweet Blossoms, for which I laid down vocals, is now out. There's still no word on the game's release, at least not yet.

New material and older material

New material is being recorded in Soundskills at the minute. In an earlier paragraph I spoke about a song I demonstrated to the folks in Penwortham; more instrumentation is being added to it at the time of writing.

My spouse and I and another friend talked about the possibility of me either 1) revisiting older material by posting it on YouTube with visualisers, or 2) rerecording and remixing older songs.

I'm taking a hybrid approach. There are songs that I'm not about to touch again, like the OSTs I'd scored (Ley Lines, Glue Globs), and for those, I'd like to slowly release them on YouTube with visualisers. The same applies for jam OSTs that I'm especially proud of. As for lyrical songs, it's worth mentioning that before 2020, I mouse-clicked everything, INCLUDING piano parts, into the piano roll in FL Studio, and so while it is playable, it feels lacking in movement and it doesn't reflect my ability. There are a number of lyrical songs I've written that I'd like to rerecord and release music videos or lyrics videos for, down the line. Let's see where this all leads.

Before I proceed, I'd like to open with a video.

This video was taken on Friday 23 January 2026, while my spouse and I were in Christoph Jakob's neck of the woods. One of the nearby small towns has a monthly karaoke night that is hyped up among the locals, and from day one of our visit Chris made sure to let us know that we were going to this. For days I racked my brain thinking about what I was going to sing… then on the night, it hit me.

I could sing Whitney Houston. Specifically, the one song that my schoolmates and I sang every Children's Day when we were in secondary education, when it was celebrated between us as “Everybody's Day.” That song, you know. Greatest Love of All.

And so I did.

The venue was packed that night and the crowds erupted in applause when I hit that initial D5. The praise for my performance was effusive. Notably, many people repeatedly said one thing, in German and in English: “your voice is extraordinary.”

I'd like to talk about that word, “extraordinary.”

For years we were all sold the tale that for someone to be successful in music, they had to be that word, “extraordinary.” Another term for that is that someone is meant to have the “X-factor.”

And to that end, many of us, myself included, were told by our parents, teachers, peers, and even industry figures, that if we didn't make it, we didn't have anything extraordinary. Even the Home Office declared, overtly and otherwise, while I was an asylum seeker, that I had nothing to give to this country. By definition, no skills, nothing “extraordinary.”

In that small town's karaoke night, I was told the opposite for the first time in a long, long while.

See, it's not fact that is believed or taken for truth: it is repetition. We see it in people when conspiracy theories and disinformation are repeated to them on a daily basis by figures small and great who are given a platform. We all can run the risk of believing lies when they are repeated to us and no alternative is presented. We can even believe lies about ourselves.

After I had received this massive effusion of praise, a slew of questions started to run through my head, and they would not leave me. I want to give voice to them now.

These are questions that demand answers, regardless of whether we can answer them.

Do I have the extraordinary to give, yes or no?

If yes, then why the FUCK has my work been slept on for so incredibly long?

I can only imagine that anyone in a similar situation to myself would ask the same questions (as they should). I will go even further, and say that if we can't answer these questions, then maybe we've been lying to ourselves and to each other about “extraordinary.”

This is a tale as old as time, too. I can think of many composers from centuries past whose names we know, who did orchestral versions of popular dance tunes. But they weren't the ones who composed those dances, for all we know. Nor were they the ones who came up with those dances. Gavottes, waltzes, mazurkas, the list goes on. In all likelihood, these dances were dreamed up by peasants whose names we wish we knew. Their names and their extraordinary musicianship, that touched the likes of Bach and Chopin for example, are lost to history. And that is a massive travesty. We have effectively signalled that their contributions are not extraordinary, and that they don't matter (when, in fact, they do).

Today is no different. We don't need to complain about lacking the extraordinary in music when there really are extraordinary musicians all around us. I can name a few, but my list would be woefully inadequate – Christoph Jakob, Psamathes, Fogheart, BLKY, FMA+12Gage, SnugglyBun, all extraordinary in their own various subgenres and niches of music – and I say that my list would be woefully inadequate because I know for a fact that I have only barely scratched the surface with criminally underrated musicians and their individual brand of “extraordinary.”

Music is expression; where singing or stage performance or playing an instrument is involved, music is also athleticism. We push our bodies to the limits to bring forth entire worlds of experience, to communicate with people who need to hear a given emotion or message. And if none of the athletic side of music is involved, we go to some really dark places sometimes to write music. I'd argue that that's fucking extraordinary, and that it's sorely needed in this day and age.

We're at the cusp of recognising entire peoples' musical contributions; we're at the cusp of something better. We're living in a time when the current systems propping us up seem to be failing left and right. Spotify and TikTok, the two platforms used by venues over the last decade to determine whether an artist should ever be played in a venue, have sold their souls for various reasons, the latest being the enablement of ICE and their cruelty through ads, or the provision of users' data to ICE.

Music, as we've seen over the decades, is a reflection of the social situation. Billy Joel did Goodnight Saigon when the Vietnam War was raging. Bruce Springsteen's Streets of Minneapolis, the most recent number 1 hit, touches on the ongoing brutality committed by ICE against the people of Minneapolis. But let's not stop there. Music and social change need not be limited to those whose names we know.

At the end of this we can all emerge better, lamenting that those voices that should have been heard were not, and trying to redress that balance. We can all emerge better, making pipelines for new creatives at any age and at any stage to advance. We can recognise the musicians around us, especially the small ones, and give them whatever leg up we can.

We can recognise that the recognition of talent happens when we return to a stronger sense of inclusive community. Many of the old names we recognise were picked out from everyday community settings: singing in bars, singing in churches, singing in karaoke nights (when, in this day and age, none of these seem to be ways forward for so many musicians). We can reject the brickwalling of smaller musicians and say, enough is enough.

Extraordinary happens now, and in our everyday. 

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Over the last several months I've set aside drum recording days. Most of them are for an unannounced project. One, however, has been with Those Fucking Snowflakes.

Up until recently, the unannounced project's drums have been recorded at Soundskills [page under construction], the creative charity in the outskirts of Preston that I've been a service user at for nine years now. Unfortunately, the friend helping me at the desk has suffered an injury and I can't record there in the near future, while they recover.

The recent Snowflakes recording happened on Monday 11 November 2024 at Trapdoor Studios in Liverpool. It was my first time there; I was in at 10 in the morning and out seven hours later.

Kit setup

As is practice for a lot of drummers, I tend to use most of the house shells and bring breakables with me – snare, cymbals, bass pedal, sticks. They're called “breakables” because they're the most expensive parts to replace, and also the quickest parts to substitute. It does make for faster setup time than say, if we were to bring an entire kit of our own. However, setup time at Trapdoor wasn't fast. The photo above shows me playing a hodgepodge of different shells, just for the sake of the right timbre. Trapdoor Studios has a good amount of different shells to choose from. Picking the right ones was part of the time taken.

At Soundskills, I typically don't switch out parts, instead preferring to use the kit as-is. But setup time is long there too.

It averages 40 minutes to get everything ready. In both cases, the bulk of that time is taken by the positioning and wiring of mics, and me needing to play each drum, or all of them together, to see if we've got the right postprocessing added.

Recording process

Time is of the essence in a studio session. We only have so many hours, and so many tries, to get something sounding and feeling right. Monday's recording session saw me do four takes of each song recorded there, then the best parts of each take would be combined together as needed. Sometimes we didn't need that at all.

Most recording sessions, I'm typically there for the one song.

But whether it's the one song or multiple songs, the pressure is on. The pressure is even greater if I'm thinking of content for the ol' socials, because if I want an unbroken bit of visuals, then I have no choice but to get a good take without any splicing. It does affect how confident I feel when I'm on the kit, but either way, I'm gonna make a good go of it.

How the day goes

In a three-hour session I typically get a snack and some teas to bulk up and ease the airways. I eat and drink as and when needed, typically between takes.

In a full-day session like what I had on Monday, I have to make sure I bring lunch, drinks, and all of the equipment I'm using. Food break does also happen between takes, but it's not as haphazard. Everyone involved sets aside a time for lunch so we all can continue working as soon as we're done. It just feels like there's more that can potentially go wrong, so doing what we can to smooth things, including timing our lunch breaks together, can help.

Closing thoughts

I look forward to the day when more songs featuring my drumming make it to streaming sites / physical media / people's ears. We creatives know how important it is to have something to show for what we say we do, and sometimes that process of getting that media finished can take months, or even years. With regards to the drum takes, as soon as those are done, there's typically mixing and mastering to do after that.

And if one day, you happen to hear more of my drumming, I hope you enjoy it. x