Steve Cowan

My name is Steve Cowan. I'm a young musician and I write and record lots of original material. I play all of the instruments on my recordings, however there are no vocals simply because I have one of the worst voices a person could possibly have. I pronounce words funny, I have horrible pitch and tone, and my voice still squeaks. I still try however, and believe it or not with the aid of a guitar I can come up with some half-decent vocal melodies. Although I didn't record them, I wrote lots of vocals for these songs. I'm a guitarist in a band called Mind the Gap, and I bring most of my songs to the band to do. However some songs I write aren't the type of songs to do with my band, and others simply aren't good enough. I don't spend a lot of time getting top-notch recordings, mostly because I didn't read the manual and I hardly know how to use the thing, but I mainly use my recorder as a tool to help the songwriting process, and it certainly does the job. I just decided to start up my own site to get the rough versions of all my songs out there for people to hear, and if you check www.soundclick.com/mindthegapnl, you can hear the finished product of some songs with the full band. John House, the bassist in Mind the Gap, also has his own recorder and does pretty well the exact same thing as me, except he sings. Well.. he tries. Check his site out: www.soundclick.com/johnahouse

Mind the Gap has been playing live a bit recently. I love it. It's probably my very favorite thing to do.

When it comes to guitar, Mike Einziger of Incubus and John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers are my main influences. My excessive use of effects comes from Mike, and my style draws from both of them. My drumming style is pretty basic, I'm your typical rock drummer. I only play bass when I'm recording, so I don't really have any influences. When it comes to songwriting and structuring in general, I draw from every piece of music I hear. Since I started writing, I pay close attention to the structures of songs, how they flow, etc., and although most of my songs follow a generic intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus etc. formula, I'm trying to get away from that and be as creative as possible.

-Korg PXR4 4-track digital recorder -American Fender Stratosonic -Random basses that John leaves around my house -Mapex drums -Yamaha keyboard -Digitech, Boss, and Maestro effects -Fender Amps