Hello!

My name is Andrew Heermance (Her - man - s), but I go by Drew.  Last year I took Intro to Music Technology and really became passionate about composing music. I decided to take piano lessons at the end of last year, and I still am taking them today. I have been really enjoying them and I am really happy that I decided to start taking lessons. Other than piano I did chorus for all of middle school, in the past I've participated in the musical, and I may start doing singing lessons with my piano teacher, who also does vocal lessons. I am excited for the year ahead!

This year I will be taking Songwriting and Production during G Block, semester one, and Music and Sound for Film during F Block, semester two.

Who am I?

Above I mentioned that my name is Drew and I take piano lessons. Obviously there is more to me than that! I am enjoy acting a lot and have done a variety of theatre camps and being in the shows at school. I am a huge Nintendo (video game company) fan, with my favorite game genres being RPGs (exploration story based games) and platformers (such as Mario). One of my favorite parts of video games are their soundtracks, so besides musical theater video games are another medium that helped form my desire to create music. I have a sister who is a senior who I am close to and an awesome beagle-mix dog named Roscoe. I enjoy creative writing as well (probably inspired by the anime and video games I watch/play) and taking my dogs for walks. Before writing music I made things in scratch but I never bothered to learn html. I also tried Blender out as well, a 3D modeling program, but never really understood how to fully model with vertices. But I've really struck a chord with composing music and I plan to keep on writing music and learning!

Why I decided to take these classes:

I went into this a little above. Before Intro to Music Technology, while I was always interested in composing music, I felt it was too late to start as I hadn't been playing a musical instrument since I was young. When I took that class I was excited to maybe compose some music despite this. Throughout last year I realized that I was really passionate about music and that composing music could possibly be something I would want to do as a career. I still have so much to learn and I don't know, because I started late, if I will ever be decent at piano. However I've realized that even if I don't get much better, I am glad that I am taking piano lessons and learning more music theory/songwriting techniques. Writing music and so far playing music is something I enjoy and I just want to keep improving, even if I never get as good as some of my friends. I'll be happy for where I am! So yeah, that's why I took Songwriting and Production. I hope that, despite the big class size, I can still learn more theory and have time in class to write more music. I took film scoring as I enjoy editing foley to line up with a scene in addition to writing music to a scene. Currently when I write songs I go for a certain theme and think of the emotions that I show display to fit in the theme, so it is nice that in underscoring it gives you the theme for you! Now it's just the composer's job to capture the emotion of the scene!

Favorite Songs/Artists:

I am a huge Nintendo (a video game company) fan, and so a lot of the music I listen to are soundtracks from various games. Video games can have jazz music, to orchestral, to chiptunes, so I love the variety of music in them. As a fan of musical theater I also like showtunes a lot. Some of my favorite soundtracks include the Xenoblade Chronicles soundtrack, the Xenoblade Chronicles X soundtrack, the Undertale soundtrack, the Mario Galaxy soundtrack, Ori and the Blind Forest, and more! Here is a recent song I love, a jazz song from Super Mario Odyssey called Jump Up, Super Star.

Tutorials I've Created:

1 - The Basic Physics of Notes, Intervals, and the Keyboard Layout

Projects:

Action Start Transcription

Now I Can Fly

My Page Last Year

My Portfolio for Last Year