My name is Timothy Dover (aka TymmyD or Tymmy Dangerously) and I am a parody artist/composer who specializes in parody songs about online games. Occasionally I will do a song about a specific game, but I try to sing about general aspects of MMOs that apply to all online games.
My life has always been filled with music as my mother has been singing since long before I was born. My whole family got involved in opera when I was in my early teens and I ended up singing in a few chorus roles. In my 20’s, I went to college for the first time and started working a lot in the IT industry. During this time, I began writing parody lyrics to various songs I liked, but I didn’t have any equipment to record them, so it never went anywhere.
I left college to get married in 1986, but stayed in the computer field for 20+ years doing everything from programming to troubleshooting and repair. In 1999 I went back to college to finish my degree. During my 4 years in college, I took various part time jobs, one of which was reading books on tape for a blind engineer working at Qualcomm. It was here I learned a lot about digital recording, mixing, editing, and production techniques. I also picked up my first microphone. I graduated Suma Cum Laude from USD, San Diego with a degree in Communication and began taking DJ spots on several now defunct internet radio stations.
In 2004 I started playing my first MMO, Star Wars Galaxies. This is where I fell in love with the MMO genre and have since played over a dozen others including City Of Heroes, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Rift, Guild Wars 2, DC Universe Online, Tera Online, Defiance, and most recently Elder Scrolls Online. During my time playing these games, I learned about about the communities, business practices, and goals of the genre.
By 2007 I was playing Lord of the Rings Online but a few friends from World of Warcraft urged me to record a couple of the WoW parodies I'd written for posterity. This gave me the push I needed to continue writing and recording parody songs. For the next 2 years, I continued writing and in 2010 I left LoTRO to play Star Trek Online. One of the cool things about STO was the fact you could play Dabo, on Deep Space 9. After a big push from the player community, Cryptic added Leeta, the well known Dabo Girl from Deep Space 9. It was a really big deal for the Star Trek fans, so I wrote and recoreded my first official parody as TymmyD entitled "Dabo With Leeta" which made it's way to the actress who played Leeta, Chase Masterson. She loved the song and it was played often on one of the best known STO internet radio stations, Subspace Radio.
Late in 2010, I decided to join the staff of Subspace Radio and was known as DJ TymmyD. After that, I was writing and recording parodies as often as possible. Many of my first song were about STO, but I didn't want to limit myself to just STO, so I sang about concepts universal to MMO gaming. Since then, almost every MMO I've played has been the subject of at least one parody, but most of the parodies I've done include some level of social commentary.
In the past 5 years, gaming has been a big part of my life and has not only served as recreation, but also a sort of social outlet. I have met some wonderful people in these games and several of them I still play with to this day. As of this moment, I am back playing STO and SWTOR, and have resubbed to the latter. Once ESO goes free to play, I'll be adding that back into the mix. This was actually the inspiration for one of my latest songs, "Come On Back".
I live in San Diego, CA and I love it here!
Weird Al Yankovic is my personal parody hero, and he has set the bar for the quality of music I attempt to create. Others include Cletus T. Judd and Ray Stevens.
My audio production features various software packages including Mixcraft Pro Studio 8 and Sound Forge Pro 12. For hardware, I use several Audio-Technica AT2020USB Cardioid Condenser USB Microphones in a sound enclosure I built myself (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRFamldHZeA).