From 2010 to the present, and especially between 2012 and 2020, I have been able to sit at the piano in the seclusion, mostly comfortable privacy of my home environment, and record my ‘musical adventures.’ I do not do this out of vanity but out of a love for the art of Creation and the art of expressing myself through the landscape of the keyboard.

I have Mr. Wilbert Baranco to thank for this. He was the last personal teacher/coach I had for several months in Oakland, California before I left that area in 1975 and returned back home to North Carolina.

More of that biography later.

As seen in the front pages, I have a Bandcamp site that has the list and history of my work, submitted in the form of EP album/CDs and is the main platform for selling my pieces. I do not get much traffic. I cannot worry about that end of it although I would certainly love nothing more than to earn a living from these efforts.

But my Bandcamp site represents only a very small fraction of what I have recorded and saved on my hard drive. Because I was wise enough to dump my recordings, made on a Yamaha Pocket Trax, to the computer (actually to the external hard drive labeled J. Olschner 2021) and to do this in that current timeline, I have folders with the month under the year holding the daily submissions. Some of these are clearly just practice but some are also spontaneous works of art.

The quality of that art might be debatable but I am not concerned with anyone’s evaluation except my own. I can recognize aspects that have value, aspects that render them honest and aspects that have varying degrees of objective criticism, but if I post them on Bandcamp, I usually have faith in their completeness.

The degree to which they are acceptable is not something I can entertain. I don’t write/play for an audience. I cannot tailor this craft to fit anything specific; if I did, I would be less an artist and more of a tailor (or a journalist as Bob would state)…I guess, for lack of a better term. And this is not something I extoll as a position of superiority. Mostly, I do not understand why I am this way, or why I cannot do both. But when I enter into a piece like (All I Need Is) A Smaller Infinity, I am exploring chord progressions that satisfies my own judgement, not the ones of a listening audience.

So, this vault will harbor musical ideas obtained by me doing what I do at the keyboard. I hope they will sustain a reality that can support my true nature and maybe I can find a way to market them in order to have a monitory stream if income so I can afford a place to live.

As mentioned, I have folders of music divided into their respective months. Some of the years have been duly edited, the songs named, submitted or not to Bandcamp, but as can be seen in the nomenclature, have been finalized.

As I find the time to not sit at the piano, to not play the albums and music of others or not to write and organize these websites, I gather the patience to open these ancient folders and listen to what I submitted “back in the day.”

I did this the other day with the 2015 folder. At the time, I had a mic and keyboard set up where I could talk about what I was doing, where I was socially, emotionally and, in some cases, like the the files submitted here, walk through the key changes.

The piece I was working on at the time, “How Did We Get So Lonely” is an excursion of music to which I only submitted the lyrics in a spontaneous way. I have not, until now in 2023, put the words to paper. I HAVE put the chord structure in Chordify and have made these available here.

A note about the file names: this procedure is constant throughout my catalog. The music recorded from 2010 to 2021 was recorded to a Yamaha Pocket Trax that was lined into to a mixer. This was a Line Out from the mixer to the Pocket Trax which received the signal from the Yamaha keys and the microphone. All I had to do was hit record on the PT.

The files came in with signature given from the PT…. the example given here is the bade reason for the inception of the Vault series…more on this later but the file name looks like this…007L_150401_2039.WAV,….I use Amadeus Pro as my sound editor…if the recording has more than one tune on it, as seen here, I would open the file in Amadeus, increase the amplitude and assign a three second silent beginning and then save the file as AMD.2047 (in this example but always using the last four digits of the file name). In this particular instance, the whole file has two separate songs….When I edit the complete file, I do a copy and paste and make two separate files from the one…here I name the first song PartOne.2039 and the second is *HowDidWeGet.2039, both save as a wav file…then I make a copy as a MP3 when I think I will float this file to Chordify and produce a sheet music of the chords, which is seen here a .pdf file.