My Story

My name is Gary Stroh and I have been a high school music teacher for 34 years. I spent the early part of my career as a high school band director and have spent the last 23 years at Cypress Lake Center for the Arts High School in Fort Myers, FL teaching vocal music and musical theatre. I have been playing keyboard and musical directing shows since I was in high school. In my current position, I am not only the music director, but lead and conduct our student orchestra. There is never enough time for the students in the pit to rehearse during class time and thus putting the pit orchestra together in a couple of weeks is always a challenge. I have always made my own rehearsal tracks, but two years ago, it dawned on me that the musicians would also benefit from learning tracks. Musical orchestrations are known for being challenging for high school musicians. Crazy key signatures and rhythms that they don’t often find in their traditional band, orchestra and jazz band music, are the norm for musical parts and pose a great challenge to even the best high school musicians.

I dove into my Logic studio and started to create complete tracks for the entire musical. I also came across SWAM technology for the first time. These revolutionary sound engines use a breath controller along with a keyboard so that you can create real sounding instruments with correct articulation, dynamics and musical phrasing. The result, is a very realistic, fully orchestrated track that we use in rehearsals and that the singers and musicians use to learn and practice their parts at home. It has done wonders for the confidence of our players and the first rehearsal with the orchestra has gone from being a struggle, to a pleasant experience.

I started doing these for just our students, and then I was hired to do an entire show for a neighboring school. I then realized that there may be a need and a market for these tracks, so I am making them available to everyone. I’ve never seen any tracks aimed at the musicians, so I decided to fill that void myself. With a show, you will get the complete package of tracks for the singers and musicians for just one low price. Each song in the show will have a separate available track for each singing part and each instrumental part. Often times, there are harmony chorus parts spread throughout a piece with long breaks in between. In this case, I create just a small snippet with the harmony section so that the singers can spend more time practicing and less time waiting for their next part.

I hope that you will check out the audio samples on the site and please let me know any questions that you may have.