Hey everyone welcome back to ask
professor Dave, today I want to answer a question I've been getting a lot lately
some of you have been noticing some of the things I've been posting in my
community tab, others have noticed what's going on over here in some of my videos
this whole business, and you want to know whether I'm a musician and if so what
kind of music I make. well indeed I have been a musician my entire life so I
thought it might be fun to go over a brief history of that aspect of myself
for whomever might be curious so here we go. music began for me when I started
playing the piano at age 8. by around 10 or 11 I started entering competitions so
things got very serious and I was practicing a lot, about an hour a day all
the way through high school. so after 10 years of this I got quite good from a
technical standpoint. I've actually posted all these childhood videos on a
separate channel if you're interested, it's just my name, Dave Farina and it's
in the featured channels list on my homepage. so that's what I was doing all
the way until I graduated high school in 2001. then in the summer between high
school and college I actually started messing around on the drums. right when I
got to college I found some people to start a band with and I was immediately
hooked. all through college all I wanted to do was play drums in bands. I was in
jam bands, funk bands, prog bands, rock-and-roll bands, anyone on campus who
needed a drummer I was their guy. I also played in some ethnic percussion
ensembles, learned a bunch of other weird instruments and just really grew
immensely in terms of my musicality and creativity so it was a great four years
for me artistically. now as you know I somehow also managed to get a chemistry
degree during that time, but nevertheless right from freshman year I knew that
what I really wanted to do was make music for a living. right after college
in 2005 I moved to Santa Cruz, California and I found a band to play with right
away. I sort of stumbled through two semesters of grad school before the band
said they wanted to move up to San Francisco so I immediately quit school
and moved up with them since the was my priority at the time. that band
fell apart almost immediately but in the city I had no trouble finding other
people to play with. I started a band called Magnus Hitch with a guitarist
that I met and we just played all the time, writing music every day and gigging
every weekend. I would tutor and substitute teach a little bit just to
make enough money to rent a really cheap gross apartment and that was just fine
for me. I only cared about music. after a couple years in 2008 that band decided
to move down to Los Angeles so we continued playing down here. we went from
prog rock to synth pop, we changed our name to Plus, we added a member and just
kept plugging away. we eventually lost steam though, one
member had an acting career that was taking off and I had actually also
joined another band called The Lonely Wild in 2012, and that was the band that
looked like it was gonna go all the way. right when I joined we did a month-long
residency at a club here in LA and we got a nice little buzz from that which
led to management, a booking agent, we got signed to a label, the whole shebang. we
released a record called The Sun as it Comes, and that did pretty well so from
2012 to 2015 we were on the road all the time, coast-to-coast, almost every state.
we did at least eight or so national tours during that time. so that's
actually one of the reasons I lost my organic chemistry teaching job, I kept
skipping out on responsibilities like faculty meetings to make it out in time
for tour dates and they got kind of sick of it. but I didn't really care, I just I
thought that the band was really going places so that was my priority, and I
guess in a certain sense I kind of let that job slip away. the tours got better
and better, bigger and bigger shows, everything looked like it was gonna work
out, and then one day it just all fell apart.
we put our third record out called Chasing White Light and the tour we did
to support it was terrible. people just stopped coming to shows, we stopped
getting radio support, nobody really knew what was going on, and pretty much just
like that the whole thing fizzled out. so 2016 was a little bit of a depressing
year for me because I was coming to terms with the fact that this band just
wasn't gonna happen. fortunately by that time I was one
year into this channel and that was picking up steam, so in my frustration I
turned all of my attention to science communication. I started working
relentlessly, making as much content as possible as quickly as possible, which
most of you are quite familiar with. I just needed something to work in my life
for once. I was already in my early 30s with nothing to show for myself
whatsoever and this seemed to be working so I really went for it full force, as
you can tell given the current state of the channel. then about a year and a half
later I got the itch for music again and I started to think about what I wanted
to do given all the failed bands and all the efforts spent, and I decided that I
really wanted to start my own project. I'd never done that before, I'd always
just been the drummer, so I wondered what it would be like to have something
that's just really my own. I wanted to write everything myself hire
players and tell them what to play and instead of being behind the drums I
wanted to be the frontman, so I decided to play synthesizers and sing lead vocal.
so I wrote a few songs, I hired some young USC music school grads and started
molding the live sound. I decided to call the project Simulated Sun, because I knew
I wanted to incorporate a lot of themes associated with science, technology,
futurism, that's just kind of who I am and that's what I want to write about
and Simulated Sun is a term that could refer to either a fusion reactor since
those simulate the processes that power any star or it could be thought of as a
true simulation like in a futuristic computer, so the potential for all kinds
of different space and technology related imagery is really clear, so
that's why I chose that name. I recorded a few songs and I actually just released
my first EP last month called Ignition, which signifies the birth of a star. I
wrote everything, I tracked almost everything myself, I don't know how to
play guitar but I did all the drums and percussion, all the synth and all the vocals, and I'm
pretty proud of how it turned out, as well as the music videos that I've
been making for these songs, two of which are out so far and two more are in the
works. so I'm still working relentlessly on this channel, don't worry I'm never
gonna stop making content for the channel, but I do try to find pockets of
time here and there to write songs, rehearse, gig out a little bit so if
you're in the Los Angeles area look out for that. for everyone else, if you've
ever wanted to support this channel but you can't afford to give money on
Patreon, something else that costs nothing and absolutely would mean the
world to me would be if you would just subscribe to the Simulated Sun YouTube
channel, which is also in my featured channels list, and follow the band on
Facebook and on Instagram which is @simulatedsun
it's really important for
me to get those numbers up right now so if you're willing to just click a few
buttons for me to subscribe and follow on my socials I would be sincerely
grateful as it's really tough to get a band up and running, especially in Los
Angeles. so now you know what I do with all of these gizmos back here, I'll put
some links in the description below in case you want to listen to my music on
Spotify or even download a few tracks, and for those of you who are not so
interested don't worry I'm gonna get right back to work on the science stuff
right now so I'll see you over there!