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2009-2015: Beginnings and My First Three albums

Gonna write a little bit about the music I've put out under the name Dani Lee Pearce so far.


I first began attempting to compose on a computer sometime in probably 2005 I think. I was a budding clarinetest and my school band teacher at the time introduced me to Finale Notepad and I tried for a long time to unsuccessfully write a full song in it. My first full songs (in a matter of speaking)came in around January of 2009; i was only 13 at the time but I had an independent study class where I got to do basically whatever I wanted after my homework was finished, what I ended up doing largely consisted of messing around in garageband on an old mac computer. I made an "album" of about 10 songs consisting of nothing but stock loops in GB, i made a CD out of it that i was unable to play at home which made me sad. i also recorded my first ever vocal song but it was extremely embarressing and i ordered it destroyed immediately

I basically only used Garageband for the first few years because it was what I knew. I had however been made aware of FL Studio as early as 2008; a guy named Ed Baker, my assistant scoutmaster back when i was in the scouts had a backroom studio where he did online collaborations with other musicians and had a little vocoder microphone to do things with his voice with and i remember getting to witness this studio during a sleepover at that house, since his son Caleb was in my scout patrol. We watched the movie Igor(2008) and thought it was really clever

two friends of mine from the same patrol had garageband on their computers at home and my next chance to write music on it came when they let me mess around in it and i figured out how to write my own compositions in it for the first time in 2010. i made i think a single song but it pointed me in the way of things to come, it was to me a major achievement and a sign that i could make rly cool stuff

I used garageband a couple more times in 2011 during free time in high school classes:




then on christmas of that year I got a casio keyboard and started to mess around with that some for more music. One of the major things I used it for was recording loops to put into the Youtube Poops i was making at the time for musical ideas. this was the first instance:



This is essentially how I worked between December 2011 to June 2012. I only really attempted one major composition around this time because playing keyboards is some shit for me still, but i recorded like three separate parts and managed to make a rough sketch of a song out of it still. 



Then in July 2012 I acquired FL Studio 10, and the first thing I made with it was this:




Not long after that I began actually seriously knuckling down trying to actually made real music using this new tool. My early compositions from this period still sound very reminiscent to my older and more improvisational based around, and it would continue that way for the next few years. I discovered bandcamp around this time after seeing a couple ppl I knew putting out music on it, and I made a bandcamp page under my first artist name Kansas City 7up. I released 3 albums and an EP between 2012-2013 on that page, none of them I was really satisfied by. But the songs in each provided templates/embryos for many songs that would appear after I started releasing under Dani Lee Pearce.

original bandcamp banner




My first bandcamp banner and the album covers for A Hypothetical Video Game(2012) and Feeling Young Somehow(2013), two early instrumental releases

After September 2013, I retired the Kansas City 7up monicker, desiring a major rebrand and an opportunity to make grander and more spectacular songs. I spent most of the next year experimenting tirelessly, watching many documentaries on contemporary music and listening to lots of albums, paying very close attention to how things were mixed and drilling the essential song forms into my head. Lots of online reading, lots of reading music books at bookstores/libraries that ranged from artist biography to musicological dissection. My favorite music to listen to during this period was largely psychedelic and experimental music, dur to how adventurous it was with how it was mixed and how the song forms had a wild range. At the same time I was also really drawn to the cleaner and sparkly synth based music from the late 70s to the early 90s, and all of that worked its way into the sound I was trying to develop. I also was developing a desire to write actual songs, and many of my first serious attempts at it were made during this period. I actually began attempting the writing side of it as early as 2003, but at that time I was mostly attempting to understand how it worked since I had no way at the time to bring any songs to life. All of this was a years-long ongoing process of internal trial and error.


I also attempted going to back to college for the second time in late 2014, where I took mostly music production classes and dabbled with using Ableton, Reason and Pro Tools. I made some new experimental compositions in this class, songs I later titled "You For You For Ich" and "Every Clock Is 9 Minutes Behind". There was also 13 minute ambient instrumental piece that I never gave a name to.

These songs, together with things I wrote using the Casio and old leftover songs from my period of experimentation, formed the basis for my first real album.

The name Dani Lee Pearce was initially my chosen, and later my legal name. The last name Pearce came from a naturopathic doctor I saw at this time who kept getting my old last name wrong, and one day it was Pierce which I really liked the sound of. Dani, or Danielle, came from a combination of my grandparents calling me Danny when I was small, and Danielle being a name kids called me in 1st-2nd grade because a girl named Danielle Rietma was in the same class as me. I struggled to form a coherent musical identity that made sense to me until I came out as trans on January 11, 2015, and then I suddenly felt like I had a whole lot I could form an identity around. I released my self-titled first album soon after, on January 30.



The next couple of albums I released in quick succession, with Depayse consisting of more songs that I composed during my period of experimentation and Kelvin consisting of material that I created and released in a single week. These came out on April 1 and May 3, 2015.




Pretty soon after I became homeless due to parental abuse and heavy anti-transness, and a lot of time passed before I'd be able to find the space to make my next project. But I was already starting to enter into a new creative phase; all three of these first releases were instrumental, I was still too shy to sing yet at this point, but I would start finding my voice at the end of the year and moreso going into the next.


My first ever attempt at recording my singing (and also playing guitar):



My next entry will go more into the next three years and 6 albums, which I now call my Pixie period!


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Kirstie

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Really cool reading, Dani! Finally I can brag on the Steve Hoffman forums about having heard you early stuff! :D I will gladly let you know you have at least one obsessive fan who can't get enough! I made an account here just to folow you. It seems like a fun site in general though so I'll keep it!

Girls rock!


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