The Legend Of MineHead
MineHead is the creation of yours truly, Earl A. Brackett. At age 8 I began playing trumpet in school band. I gave up the trumpet after experiencing headaches from playing and began snare drum/percussion. After 2 years of snare my mom bought my first kit, a Slingerland 5 piece. Taking private lessons from a local teacher/jazz musician, I was told that I was a natural and with application I could play professionally or teach someday. By age 13 my brother Kevin and I were playing cover songs by The Who, Led Zep, Aerosmith, Queen, etc. I gave up private lessons & focused on rock drumming. My first major influences were Keith Moon, Nick Mason and Neil Peart. In the following years I was heavily influenced by Phil Collins & to a lesser degree Bill Bruford, Stewart Copeland, Manu Katche, Barriemore Barlow, and Vinnie Colaiuta. By age 16 I was playing in a college punk band that covered The Police, Clash, and Ramones. On the strength of my interest in the music industry and bands that utilized the studio, like Pink Floyd, I went to The Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, OH at age 20 and was certified as a Recording Engineer. I returned home & found little opportunity for studio employment, unless you opened your own studio. I took a break from playing in bands and earned a degree in Electronic Engineering and started working as a programmer and then in software development. After a decade with one company I branched out as a "consultant" and worked for IBM, Wachovia, and Vanity Fair. In the late 90's I bought my first Strat & started to learn the guitar. As home recording went digital I started putting together a small studio and made my first recordings, featuring drum machines & synths. By 2003 I had started working with Acid Loops. They were a starting point for me. I was still mainly "a drummer", trying to create my own tracks with loops while adding my own ideas on top of the looped material...percussion & string ensembles cost BIG $$, loops are relatively cheap. A few years later, after adding a Roland XP-60 and an EMU PK-6 to my stable, my first tracks were posted on Broadjam in 2003 and I began hitting Top 10 charts consistently with most of the songs that I was writing. Then tragedy struck my family, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and I put music on hold. She sacrificed everything to raise me & my brother, she played piano when she was young, and picked it back up when my brother & I were learning music...at one time we were all taking lessons from my childhood teacher and playing as a trio in our living room...she gave everything to help us realize our dreams. She died in 2004. The next project that I would work on would be a documentary film that I fell into, a long story, but the finished product is available on DVD and a preview is on YouTube (see link on front page). That took a full year off & on and features my earliest tracks that charted on Broadjam. So, I then focused on switching to Electronic Drums, first DDRUM then Roland V-Drums. The dynamics and the playability had gotten to the point that I had no reservations about recording them straight in. I had tons of great sounds that opened up the creativity that a 5- piece acoustic kit could never deliver. And great drum sounds cost HUGE money, I had to go electronic to get the quality that I desired. In 2009, after getting years of guitar, keyboards and bass behind me, I started recording with new purpose. My goal was to post a new song every week until I hit my physical limit on BJ. I put everything into each track, all of my musical experience, all of my technical know-how and what I've learned in the studio and with bands. The music can be dense or sparse, up or down-tempo, lo-fi to grandiose. I'm using everything at my disposal to create music that is interesting to listen to and that reflects my interests as a musician. I hope you enjoy it, there's a little something in there for everyone.