Lisa has natural musical ability. She played flute in band, but her gift is her voice. It runs in her family, one of her cousins sings in the opera in Vienna. Lisa has also learned some guitar and she sang and played percussion in a foursome with some friends.
Lisa writes most of her own vocal melodies. I will sometimes give her starting ideas, but what she ends up with is her own creation. Lisa also writes/sings all her own vocal harmonies as well.
Instrumentation and history
Jim
I started tinkering with musical instruments at an early age. My mother's acoustic guitar and our family's Hammond organ were my first victims. I never took any formal piano lessons, but I never passed up an opportunity to play around on keyboards of various types. As a child I would call my best friend and we'd bang on guitars with spoons while we listened to each other over the phone (circa 1966). In the 6th grade I took up the trombone in a very good band program and my formal music training began. Not long after, my parents half-relented and bought me an electric guitar, ... no amplifier. I made an amplifier out of my sister's record player by inserting an input jack between the cartridge and the amplifier section. The distortion from the impedance mismatch was good enough for rock-n-roll. By the time I graduated from high school, I had added saxophone and baritone horn to the list of instruments I was at least competent on. In college I played trombone and sax. Shortly thereafter I picked up flute, clarinet, and I tried hard to learn the drums, but never really got there.
Electronic instruments:
Yamaha WX7 wind controller (looks like a clarinet, plays like a sax, sounds like almost anything)
Roland keyboard controller, DrumKat percussion controller. These instruments control the sound generating capabilities of my computer system.
