Keef Made a Cool Thang
Music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I’m grateful to my parents for instilling a love of music within my brother and I at very young ages. As a four-year-old, I can remember Mom always playing records in the house… Elvis, The Beatles, BJ Thomas, Glen Campbell, The Four Tops, The Temptations. It was extremely unusual for there not to be music playing inside and outside of the house. On my outdoor adventures, I would hear Don Williams, Buck Owens, Willie, Waylon, and Johnny among the sounds coming from my dad’s shop. Oh, and Ronnie Milsap… and Eddie Rabbitt! I loooooved Eddie Rabbitt. And A Rainy Night.
Couple all of that (seemingly-unrelated-to-this-blog-post-information) with my ten years of piano lessons, my drumming and guitar-playing husband, our playing in a band together for ten years, my bass-playing-and-singing-twelve-year-old-daughter, and you’ll understand why I was thrilled to be a small part of this Cool Thang that Keef Made.
During some of those ten years I was taking piano lessons, I knew a kid in church youth group who played guitar in the youth band. He was that kid who was freaky good at playing anything he could get his hands on. His name was Keith Groover.
Fast forward a bunch of years, circa 1999, to when I was dating my now-husband, Matt. We were hanging out one afternoon and he said, “I need to run by my buddy’s house and pick up __________.” I can’t remember the details, obviously, but it was some sort of music gear. And whadduya know… that buddy was Keith! I hadn’t seen Keith in years! In the years to follow, Keith and Matt would form a couple of bands and record some music together.
Fast forward again through a bunch of years (weddings, births, bands, concerts, careers, etc)… Keith contacted me about creating the logo for a new electronic instrument that he was working on. He sent me a video showing how it worked and what it sounded like… I was instantly intrigued, especially since over the past couple of years, I’d kind of gotten into the whole EDM wave. You know, that genre that’s kind of like Ronnie Milsap’s stuff, except the exact opposite….? 🤷🏻♀️
We worked through some ideas and initially I missed the mark. Here are the lead-in pages to the first couple of logos I presented…
I was digging the first one, and had a hunch that would be the one Keith would pick. To my surprise, he liked the second one better, but was wondering if there was a way to make it a little less modern. I felt I was missing the mark, so I had Keith create a Pinterest board to show even more ideas of the tone he was looking for.
This helped us narrow some ideas down even further. And he suggested dipping the bottom down to create more of an obvious wing effect on the second one. I added some framing along the bottom to give it more of an aeronautical and finished look, and we went with gold and black to give it a more classic and established feel.
Keith was pleased with the finished look and I was pleased to have helped an old friend out in the process. There aren’t many things that bring me more joy than watching talented friends / family channel their talents into functional ways that allow them to publicly share those gifts with the world. Y’all, this is a freaky cool instrument. Get in line to get one for yourself, your kids, your mom, your dad… you can pay them back for all those years of piano lessons they put you through. 🙌🏻🎵⚡️ Set to release early 2019. TheGlide.cc