For this week's theme, I thought of the word Aniseed as "Anna's Seed."  One of my open mic friends goes by the name Annabelle, and she is a talented singer-songwriter who gets up on stage almost every week to share her talents.  She befriended another one of my friends whose artist name is Rach Shine, and the two of them have performed together and become rather close.  Rach and I met mid-last year at an open mic night, where neither one of us ended up playing due to various technical difficulties.  Rach had seen a video on Instagram of me performing, and she recognised me as I just so happened to be sitting at the table next to her.  She reached out (or rached out, if you will) to me, and we've become really good friends.  In the following months, we have gone to more open mics together and started performing as a duo.  This is despite the fact that both of us have full-time jobs, so it has been a delicate balancing act to make it all happen.  We are so both so thankful that it did though, well and truly!


VERSE 1
I went to Stones Corner
Where everything went wrong
I didn't get to play
Not even just one song

Someone's keyboard blew up
I was going on tenth
An early work shift beckoned me
And I'd go home before then


VERSE 2
I was sitting next to her
Not knowing who she was
Then she turned around to face me
Just because

She had seen me on the net
As I played on my keys
She struck up a convo
And we were both so pleased


VERSE 3
We really hit it off
She played piano too
We talked for two hours
And nothing was taboo

I had made a new friend
And entered the Rach Shrine
We both clicked instantly
Her talents were like mine


VERSE 4
Over the coming months
We chose to be a team
Performing in front of friends
It felt like such a dream

We keep getting closer
Whenever we touch base
Let's hope we keep this up
Both on and off the stage

The Rach Shrine

Protis has been writing music since 1998, when he was still in high school. The name Protis came about from watching the TV show Pokemon; his original name was Piggy, and just how Pikachu evolves into Raichu, well he decided that Piggy would evolve into Protis. The name has stuck ever since then.

Protis is a big fan of computer-based music.  The first computer program he used for music purposes was Cubase Lite on good ol' Windows 3.1 operating system.  Over the years he moved on to Cubast VST, where he further developed his skills as a songwriter.  Most of his early recordings were instrumental works, as at the time he was unable to compose decent lyrics.

After a while, Protis decided to leave the realm of General MIDI and progress into the world of loops and samples.  He accomplished this by using the ACID range of products.  Countless hours were spent with this brilliant piece of software, coming up with lots of cool beats.

Protis has also dabbled in the FruityLoops software, now called FL Studio.  He utilised FL Studio to write songs which contained his first self-penned lyrics.  He was surprised at just how well his lyrics came across in each song, fitting in well with the music.  And all this from someone who could never write words to his songs!