About T.H.I.S.
T.H.I.S. represents the culmination of all my creative efforts: a merging of my previous music and programming sites, as well as the introduction of many other creative endeavors never before posted online. The music and programming sites each represent years of award-winning excellence (see below), and I hope to add many new and equally excellent bits of information to this new, comprehensive site.
Feel free to drop me a line anytime, and enjoy the new site!
-Tanner (9 July 2008)
About T.H.I.S. Music
T.H.I.S. Music and Sound (a division of Tanner Helland’s Interesting Stuff) represents 15+ years of award-winning music composition. “What awards,” you ask? How ’bout:
- 1st Place, Audio Division: 2000 Utah State Multimedia Festival
- 5 consecutive Superior Ratings, Utah Federation of Music
- Golden Award of Excellence, World Wide Web Music Composition (courtesy of Claudette Letendre)
- 5 (perfect score), Advanced Placement Music Examination
Okay - so that last one was a long time ago, but awards are awards. :) I also have seven years music teaching experience, including two years as a private piano teacher at the superb Art City Music Academy. My list of original compositions has topped 110 songs as of 2008, including over 75 fully orchestrated/multiple-instrument songs (the rest are piano pieces). I’ve composed music for video games (Siege of Magnetoss, Wild Waters), weddings, home videos, piano lessons, and mostly for my own personal enjoyment.
T.H.I.S. has been on the net in one form or another for some 10 years now. It started out as part of my first website (hosted free by good ol’ www.50megs.com, back when 50 megs was a LOT of web space), then gradually merged into tannerhelland.tripod.com. In 2001 it was slowly incorporated into my largest game project to-date, “The Gathering Project” (later “The Lost Alliance”), and then in early 2005 it found a home at www.tannerhelland.com under a fantastic custom-built engine from Kroc Camen of Camen Design. Since 2005, T.H.I.S. has seen hundreds of thousands of hits, thousands of free song downloads, and almost 20,000 unique visitors - no small feat for an unadvertised, independent music site consisting mostly of MIDIs.
And now, in 2008, T.H.I.S. has moved to my personal server on www.thehellands.com where it will stay for the forseeable future.
As part of this move, a lot of the site and its design have changed. I’m now using Wordpress as my codebase along with an excellent free theme from Bob of BlogOhBlog. The logo at the top and all textual work is mine and mine alone, along with all MIDIs and mp3s available for download.
With this change also comes an “adjustment” of sorts to the style of the site. Unlike T.H.I.S. v1, which was constructed as a business- and sales-oriented front for my studio, T.H.I.S. v2 will be more of a blog. I’ll post new stuff whenever I’m able, and in the next couple weeks I hope to have all of T.H.I.S. v1’s content available here. I also plan on releasing some new elements T.H.I.S. v1 lacked (such as sheet music), for which the new layout and design is just perfect.
All of this is good news (I hope!), but I should add my standard disclaimer: music is not my profession, nor is it my only hobby. After the fortunate success of my first novel in last year’s Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award competition, I’ve been working hard on a new, better draft to send out to publishers and agents. That draft will be finished mid-September, and the vast majority of my effort over the next 6 months will be in pushing that to press.
So I make no promises as to the quantity of updates for T.H.I.S. v2. I’ll try to poke my head in at least every couple weeks, but if you don’t see me for awhile then just subscribe to my RSS feed and drop me a line to let me know you miss me. 
As before, comments, suggestions, and ideas are always welcome. I may not respond in a timely manner, but every e-mail is read and appreciated.
Enjoy the music!
About T.H.I.S. Programming
T.H.I.S. Programming (a division of Tanner Helland’s Interesting Stuff) represents 10 years of award-winning VB excellence. “What awards,” you ask? How ’bout:
(in 2000 and 2006. Yikes!)
As well as the 2001 Sterling Scholar award for Computer Technology. Impressive stuff! 
Anyway, this site has been hosted many places over the years, and I thought it was finally time to give it a permanent home on my permanent server. Comments are always welcome, and although VB has moved far beyond v6 (which I still faithfully use), I’ll leave this code up for as long as people find it useful.
Happy coding!
