Paul Marossy

First and foremost, I am an improvising musician. I love the raw edge that improvisation can have, and the challenges it presents with thinking fast on your feet. This page came about because I am hopefully at the beginning of a for real recording project. There's really no band per se at this point in time but I have recently connected with a drummer who is willing to help me out on my current tunes in a long distance colloboration type thing. I will probably continue being pretty much a one man band for most of the proposed project except for the drum parts (I hope). I recently purchased my own electronic drum set because I have wanted to play the drums off and on for at least 30 years, so I'm just going for it!
For a long while, I have been trying not to be discouraged as I have not been able to connect with anyone here in town that has the time or is willing to work with me on this. The other problem I have is the lack of funds for this project. At this point, the CD project seems like a pipe dream, but I will still keep hoping things will turn around. In the meantime, I guess I will continue to upload stuff for people to listen to as I have been doing. I still have hope for the future, though. "Hope is a desire with an expectation of accomplishment."
Having said that, the tunes above are not meant to be polished studio demos, they're just to give you some idea of what I sound like - as well as for me to see what my ideas sound like. Some of my tunes are really just improvised pieces based on an overall idea for the tune. I really love to listen to jazz and jazz-rock fusion, but it's not what I tend to play most of the time. I have apparently come up with my own blend of elements that comprise my signature sound. I love it when people say "you sound like so and so" - it's rarely the same person twice! That's music to my ears as the last thing I want to be is some musical copycat.Anyhow, the bottom line is that I'm coming back from a 6 year hiatus from doing any kind of recording and "composing" after I got married December 2000 and while my children were young. Now that they are at an age where they are a little more self-sufficient, I feel that I can focus on music more now.
I've been playing guitar for a while now. I started learning guitar in 1988 when I was twenty-one years old and had no previous musical experience or inclinations, but I have always loved music. I have no formal training, am 100% self-taught and I just love all the things that you can do with an electric guitar! I am not able to read music, but I have taught myself enough music theory to know more or less what I'm doing, and I have found some formulas that work for me with new ones continuously being added! So, anyway, I have recently decided that I need to make my dream become a reality, that is to do something serious with my stuff. I'm glad that there is a place like MySpace to give me an outlet as I have been a very frustrated musician the last couple of years! Most of my playing "to the public" has been via church music teams, but I just don't seem to fit in most music teams because I am not content being a parrot playing stuff just like it appears on a CD - most of the time, I like to make it more personal than that, which I guess is a problem for most church music teams. And, hence, the frustration for me. And then there is the side of me that is presented here!
I have a fellow guitar slinger friend named Denny that I used to play with at church who once called me a "closet virtuoso", and so I had originally decided to remain quasi-anonymous to kind of go along with that theme and initially chose the name J201 because it is the designation given to a type of transistor that I have used in some of my DIY distortion pedals, and because I like the sound of it (it's like a code name or something). But, now I am coming out of the shadows and using my real name instead.
I am really mostly an improvising musician that likes to experiment with ideas and sounds, but I do work on stuff that sounds like it was composed, too. While I was growing up, I listened to a wide variety of stuff that was a product of the late 70s - Ashra, Tomita, Kraftwerk, Nektar, Focus, Klaus Schulz and a lot of other types of music. I can still remember the first time that I heard Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" record (around 1973 when I was about 6 years old), it was unlike anything I had ever heard - it was cutting edge and that day is indelibly marked in my memory. As a teenager, I was a punk rocker and into all the heavy metal bands of the 80s. In the 90s and onwards, jazz and jazz-rock fusion became the only music that really appealed to me. As a result, I think that I have a very interesting style because I seem to conglomerate all of these different elements into the stuff that I put "on tape". I often tend to feel like a musical weirdo, but I've never felt "normal" anyhow! I live, sleep, eat and breath music, but I still have yet to connect with any other musicians that would be interested in what I do. I guess it's kind of a "hard sell". I guess it's never an easy road for an improvising musician who's not satisfied playing cover tunes at a party somewhere. I admire people who do that well, but it's just not for me.
As I mentioned above, the tunes above are not meant to be polished studio demos, they're just to give you some idea of what I sound like. If you want to hear some of my ancient stuff, click HERE . A lot of the tunes here are kind of rough, but they're just ideas that I had and some of them are more or less finished pieces that I think could have some potential. The recordings were done on an ancient Yamaha MT44 cassette 4-track recorder and a Boss DR-550 drum machine and a few tunes have some cheesy keyboard drum tracks! That's why I say these things are on my "musical sketchpad".
Some people probably also know me from my DIY guitar website, www.DIYguitarist.com . Oh well, I guess I'm not that anonymous after all...
Here's a few more of my tunes at my Improvising Guitarists page. You can hear previous tunes like "Sexton Demo 1" here:
Find more music like this on The Improvising Guitarist