Jason Sheppard and I just made a song together

Morgan Linton and Jason Sheppard

As many of you know we’ve been in self-quarantine since March 3rd at our place in San Francisco. We started earlier than most but now I’m very glad that we did given how quickly everything has progressed. But I want to take a break from the negative news you’re reading and talk about something positive, the changes we can all make to optimize our time at home.

So far, while I’ve been home I have binge-watched zero TV shows, in fact I’m barely watching TV at all. Instead I’ve decided to spend my additional free time doing two things:

  1. Increasing my Japanese study from 30 mins a day to 1.5 hours a day
  2. Learning how to make hip hop starting with Timbaland’s Masterclass

It’s been a dream of mine for years to learn to speak Japanese, and long before that I had a dream of making hip hop. Yeah, I know, you didn’t see that coming, but there’s a bit of a backstory to it.

When I was thirteen I entered a rap competition put on by a local radio station here in the Bay Area. The winner of the competition would get their rap played on the radio and then have a music video made that would air in Australia. Long story short, I won the competition and a film crew flew out and shot a music video of my rap, which aired in Australia. Unfortunately, this was before the Internet and all my attempts to find the music video haven’t panned out.

That inspired me to start taking music more seriously…and then I discovered computers, got into web development, and well – that derailed my music dreams. Now that I’m at home, all day, every day, with really no end in sight I decided, it’s time to dust off that dream and give it a go.

I’ve been hearing good things about Masterclass so thought I’d use that as a springboard. Timbaland is one of the most talented producers out there and so far I’ve been really impressed with his Masterclass. This weekend I started learning Logic Pro as the class expects you to be able to use a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), and well, I don’t know anything about DAW’s so I’m starting with the basics.

This weekend I made my very first track in Logic Pro and yesterday I created a Soundcloud account and posted it there and shared it on Twitter. My thought is, why not just get it out there as I progress? If I’m going to make music I need to get used to sharing it with the world out of the gate.

A little later I looked on Twitter and saw a tweet from Jason Sheppard, a domain investor I wrote about last week who is also a professional DJ. Here’s the tweet:

As the tweet says, Jason did a mash up layering “Gimme 50” on top of my song, and well, I really like it! You can listen to it below:


If you’d like to follow Jason or me on Soundcloud, here’s links to each of our profiles. Really looking forward to putting together some more jams with Jason and continuing my journey back into hip hop.

Follow Jason on SoundCloud

Follow Morgan on SoundCloud

Thanks for reading, and for listening. If you want to hear more music let me know and I might just add my latest track to my sidebar…of course if you think – “hey I just want to read about domains, stop with the music stuff!” let me know that too.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton