About Daniel Butterfield
about Daniel Butterfield
A Lifetime of Music and More
Daniel Butterfield is an independent, amateur musician, music producer, and mix/mastering engineer from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. He was born on March 22, 1980, in Burlington, and is a Palauan-American immigrant to Canada.
He was born with pitch memory, and began playing the drums at age eight. He first began receiving original pieces of music in his head worth keeping between the ages of seven and ten. He began playing guitar at age fifteen, piano at sixteen, bass guitar at seventeen, trumpet at twenty, and rudimentary flute around the same time.
Rather than pursue a music career, Daniel attended McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he earned an Honours degree in Communication Studies (Cultural Studies & Linguistics), followed by a diploma at Mohawk College in Business and Marketing. He married in his twenties, and found work in administration at the City of Hamilton before relocating to Oshawa and starting a new career in Search Engine Optimization.
In 2016, after a divorce, a few years of therapy and addiction recovery, he experienced a miraculous spiritual awakening, and began experiencing what you would call “supernatural” phenomena including channeling, mediumship, and the “clairs”–clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, and more. Unfortunately, this experience also came with severe bouts of schizophrenia–it did not come with instructions and there are consequences for “getting it wrong.” A miraculous period growth occurred in Fall 2019-Winter 2020, though a period of more severe schizophrenic symptoms emerged in July of 2020.
As such, he will be launching a career as a channeler, mystic, philosopher, and spiritual teacher as well as a music career. Given the amount of work involved and the challenges of his mental condition, this will take some time.
Fortunately, he will be using this time to continue to develop his considerable skills as a musician and a music producer/engineer, and will be producing recorded music for the future.
His current music setup involves using three rooms in his parents’ house: Studio A, a former bedroom that houses the live rock band rehearsal and recording space, drum kit, keyboards, electric guitars, bass guitars, P.A. systems, and amplifiers; Studio B, an office/bedroom where he does mixing and mastering, and records acoustic guitar, violin, vocals, and wind instruments; and Studio C, a “beats laboratory” that houses an Yamaha DTX-500 electronic drum kit, a timbales set with an elaborate Latin Percussion rack that includes cowbells, jam bells, and wood blocks, a set of congas, and an alternate drum kit with a double-kick drum pedal.
His current arsenal of musical instruments:
drums,
electric guitar, bass guitar, acoustic guitar (steel, nylon, and 12-string),
violin, flute, harmonica (C, G, D, A, E, F), trumpet, alto saxophone,
tenor saxophone, trombone, glockenspiel, congas, timbales.
Other percussion instruments at his disposal: tambourine, shakers, cowbells, cabesa, claves, guiro, vibraslap, triangle, sleigh bells.
His synthesizers are the Yamaha MX-88, Roland XV-3080, Roland JD-Xi, Roland JX-10, and Yamaha FB-01.
He completed his debut album, Self Confidence, in October of 2022. It is an entirely self-produced, independent album, released through CDBaby. In addition to writing the songs and performing all the audio, he also mixed and mastered the album himself.
In terms of musical influences, Daniel was in the unusual position of being the youngest of five children, and having his tastes more oriented towards generations a few years older than he. He is fond of the 1980s pop sounds of his youth, but his musical sensibilities were heavily influenced by listening to the oldies radio format of the 1980s and 1990s (which covered the period 1955 to 1975) and exposure to the music collection of his older siblings, especially his oldest brother, twelve years his senior, who at one point worked at must have been a pretty good record store in Toronto. As a teen, he got into psychedelic music, and by his twenties, he enjoyed getting high on marijuana and experiencing listening to and performing music in that vein.
In his early twenties, he met the girl he would marry (and spend eleven years with), and as such, he learned to overcome being a music snob, and began listening to a wide range of music with an open mind for the first time in his life. She deserves at least some credit.
Recently, Daniel has been opening up to newer sounds, and trying hard to understand what the heck is going on in the hearts and minds of these generations of people out there.
Self Confidence and the second album (which currently has the working title Sophomoric Hijinks) will contain a lot of throwback-type songs, with influences ranging from classic rock to 1980s pop to hip hop beats to 60s swing, to jazz, and maybe a bit of country and folk, too. Acoustic guitars, nice sing-able choruses, nice melodic songs like they used to make. There will also be dance tunes, maybe some EDM-inspired things, some funky songs, too. “Indie” might be a good catch-all term for what he creates.
Daniel claims to have a backlog of original material “about four albums deep,” including the one already produced.
Because his spiritual condition involves spirits (“ghosts” technically) having the ability to interfere with his voice box, it may be a while before he will be able to engage in a live performing career as a singer. He will be working on it in private in the meantime.
Current Career Desires
Daniel is currently open to possibilities regarding collaboration with others who may be interested in a mutually-beneficial working arrangement:
• He is open to collaborating with musicians on performances of his own
live material; however, this will be a challenge given his current
mental health and this is not exactly ideal; it would take someone
having great patience. It will be some time before he can prepare a live
set.
• He is excited at the chance to produce, mix, and master demos and songs for musicians for a small fee, in order to build experience working with artists and developing a portfolio of work. If you have a song you’d love to turn into a produced track, he’d be willing to negotiate a bargain-basement rate in order to get that first opportunity.
• He is also excited, for a small fee, to co-produce tracks for other artists in the form of laying down beats and grooves, and is eager to perform overdubs as a session musician on the wide variety of musical instruments and synthesizers at his disposal.
• He is also eager for the opportunity to do mixing and mastering engineering work for other artists’ recordings, and to build his experience as an engineer. He would be willing to negotiate a bargain-basement rate in order to get that first opportunity.
• If there is someone out there with a proper business mindset who is
interested in being in the business of making money from (i.e.
exploiting) my musical talent, please contact me through the contact form.
I would require someone with a realistic attitude, adequate experience
and funding, and the desire to put together a touring act that showcases
my original material; it should work with a five-piece live act, with
me backed by four hired, seasoned touring musicians.
Make Your Musical Dreams a Reality
I've made my musical creations come to life--let me make yours come to life. In addition to a lifetime of lessons from various teachers, I've spent enough time around guys who went to hard-core music school to be put through my paces about knowing music theory, harmony, and what's really what out there.
Together, we can work from whatever style of music you'd like to emulate and see what we can do to turn your songs into a real-life, bad-ass. good-sounding record.