Alyssa Gibson - ProfilesArchive

About Me

My name is Alyssa. I'm a guitarist, pianist, I sing a little bit, and I love doing all of it - both covering other musicians' work and creating my own.

Music is something that has always enthralled me, and I'll spend hours playing it, making it, recording it, performing it... This page is a place where I like to share things that are both finished and incomplete. I enjoy having others listen to my files, and it really means a lot to me when people take the time to check out a track or two - so thank you for that! :) It's been really great to have a place to both share things and to listen to other musicians, which is something in which I can get lost for hours as well.

I've just graduated college, so now that I'm home, I hope to get some more recording done, so as those are finished they will appear above, so check back for updates! I appreciate everybody listening and I hope you will continue to revisit my page. :)
Covers
Naked as We Came (Iron and Wine)
Jezebel (Iron and Wine) - By the duo Spiders and Butterflies, made up of myself and guitar buddy Dima .
Originals
Racing the Storm
Six Fifteen (unfinished)
El Soldado
A Haunted Heart
(The song photo for Six Fifteen is a sketch by our favorite artist, Cyrus Jabarzedeh, the man in our videos).

About the Flash Player
These are two home-recorded files I made with my good friend Courtney Kollegger . Both of these songs were ultimately her creation - the gorgeous motives you hear throughout both came to be through her experimentation on the piano. You'll hear them repeating for the duration of both files. She's a trooper - unwavering for 27 minutes, even through my temperamental rhythm changes!
Courtney wanted to work together on these, and I was excited, because they sounded so wonderful! She had the motives but wasn't sure about where to go with it. And I, being so excited to improvise with something, sat down at once to start working with it to add more parts. And the Rhythms of the Sea Hold Us There has been around for about four years now, and so I've had time to work out some of the major themes, which are all present in the file here. Even so, most of this file is improv.
On the contrary, And All We Have Is a Ghost is very new - Courtney wrote it with a vocal part in mind, but this is our instrumental take on it. It's essentially her song entirely - I was thrilled she let me play with the piano a bit for the recording. :-P The themes and melodies are originally her creation (for her vocals) - in this file I sampled them as well as experimented with them (there's no way I couldn't, they're beautiful!) but I also ended up stumbling onto some new things, which was good.
Both files were recorded in a small piano practice room we happened to find on campus that had two pianos in it. So we're each on one, which opened up a world of possibilities - quite a contrast to how we had previously crammed together on a single bench trying to play the same keys. ;) We started recording and just let everything go and heard what happened naturally. As a result, both files happened to be majorly improvved and 27 minutes long - purely unintentional! If you're interested, please take the time to listen to them all the way through, even if you have to take breaks - they change throughout, and I would love for anyone to give them a listen and to see how you feel about them. :)
More performance videos are posted on my YouTube channel .
Thanks for stopping by! =D

My Interests

Music:

Member Since: 6/18/2006
Band Website: youtube.com/giddygeddy
Band Members: I do things on my own, but I am also in collaboration with:

Dima , as Spiders and Butterflies

Lady liketidalwater
the lovely Courtney K.

and New Paltz crazies Dan, Jared, and Sean that you see in the Boston and Paramore videos.

Influences: Everything around me. All types of music. Classic rock is my lifelong love, and that includes mostly everybody, but my big favorites are Rush, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Boston, The Stones, Pink Floyd, and Queen, to name a few. But I enjoy all types of rock , lots of independent and alternative things too. I've been very into current female singer-songwriters and I'm definitely influenced by that, especially contemporary female-fronted rock bands.
But I'm also big on instrumentals, and that's one of my favorite genres to work in. I love film scores - James Horner, Howard Shore, Craig Armstrong and Hans Zimmer are a few of the guys I really like, and I feel I'm influenced by that too, mostly in piano. I can get really stuck on Latin tunes and sometimes that shows up in my guitar. Jazz is great, especially the classics. Electronica , ambient trip-hoppy stuff, as well as post-rock , although not really what I produce, is still influential in the way that it's a composition with a wonderful sense of sound, and is the type of thing that influences my instrumental stuff. I'd even include showtunes , in the way that the Spring Awakening soundtrack, which is amazing, has recently motivated my songs to start sounding more musical-y. So more of that might be showing up soon. There's a vast amount of things by which I am inspired and influenced - this is just a piece of it.
Beyond other artists, everyday life is an inspiration. Imagination is inspiration. Many of my original songs are fictional scenarios that I'm interested in and would like to play out in a song. Some things are real and somehow find their place in my music.
Sounds Like: Acoustic folkiness, sad and troubled piano, upbeat rockishness.

I've been doing a lot of open mics this past year, most of them at our little coffeeshop 60 Main in New Paltz, NY. We started to go every Thursday this past semester, and so the videos have piled up. A few selections abound below:
Our most recent performance of Boston's Peace of Mind.
Our cover of Paramore's Misery Business.
An original song of mine entitled Two Weeks' Notice.
The Spiders and Butterflies original The Battle at Cedar Creek.
The Spiders and Butterflies original At The Hands of the Sea.
Type of Label: None