This site started out around 1998 as a small part of ACME Records. Back then I used it to have some of the original music online for members of our fusion band BeebleBrox. A second somewhat naive thought was that some famous jazz musician might, by sheer coincidence, find one of the compositions and like it so much that they would record it.
Well, that didn’t happen. The only people interested in recording our originals were Monika Herzig and myself (Peter Kienle). And we recorded a lot of it over the years. In 2005 I found out that in order to actually get royalties for the performance of your original music we had to have a publisher. Although I had been a writer member with ASCAP for a long time, the music had never been ‘officially’ published. I applied to also become publisher member. The application included a list on which to fill in ten prospective names for the new publishing company, from which ASCAP would pick one. Level Three Music was my third choice and must have been inspired by some book I had read – so the name is technically not my fault.
This was when I got the domain name levelthreemusic.com and branched it off from ACME Records. Soon I started publishing all of our music – recorded or not. At that time we had close to 900 compositions between the two of us. And that excluded any of the classical guitar music I had been composing. Before Level Three became a thing, there were a few dozen tunes from the BeebleBrox book. You could list them on a simple HTML page – ugly, but it worked. Listing many hundreds (and more coming) needed a different approach. I have been programming since my early twenties and I also had good experience working with a database program. Setting something up on the Level Three web site using HTML and a MYSQL database couldn’t be so hard, could it? Let’s just say I learned a lot from that experience.
(screen shot of old L3)
Eventually I got it to work through lines and lines of PHP spaghetti code. And as I added functionality it got more sprawling. Adding a listing of available audio and video files on YouTube and other sites required extending the MYSQL database – by lot.
Eventually I brought all my compositions for classical guitar online. Some of them were free downloads others went behind a pay wall. In 2014 I added some big band arrangements. While the initial version of the site ran on crummy HTML code at some point I moved it to WordPress. Looking at that code today gives me goosebumps.
Finally in March 2024 the big overhaul took place. The reworked site is now online…..