My Life Has a Soundtrack

Music has always been a big part of my life. My parents both sang in a country and western band, by dad was a multi-instrumentalist, and nearly all the branches of my family tree have a songbird nest on them somewhere. It was no wonder, then, that I should want to learn to play.

I started tinkering with a piano early on, but it never took hold. I dabbled around with the recorder and all those other instruments they introduce you to in grade school, then got interested in drums.

Drums don’t get you to reading music, though, at least not the kinds of music I wanted to read, so when band became an option at school in grade seven, I took to the trumpet. That was my primary instrument through college, although I also got some experience in a jazz band playing flügelhorn and in a drum and bugle corps playing a tenor bugle pitched in G.

In the early 1990s, I was introduced to handbells and instantly became enamoured with this most unique instrument. I directed a handbell team in Houston for 17 years before moving to Canada, where I played briefly in a church-based bell choir and then helped charter a community handbell society in Calgary.

Along the way, I taught myself to write arrangements of songs that I wanted to play, but couldn’t find the music for. Early on, those arrangements were for trumpet or brass ensemble, then later on I switched my focus to writing arrangements for vocal choirs and then handbells.

I initially wrote my arrangements on paper, then several very basic notation programs such as Notator for the Atari ST series of computers. Eventually I found my way to Sibelius, which I have been using for more than a decade. Recently, I’ve been switching over to Dorico - and although it doesn’t have much for handbells natively, you can set up a custom template that makes things easier. Here’s how:

Here are some arrangements I currently have published under Hal Leonard’s “Arrange Me” setup.