Andreas Jahn: Photo by Kim Leeson
East Dallas 13-year-old Andreas Jahn sits down in front of his home computer and pulls up his music composition software, Logic Express. He scrolls through hundreds of files, each a music composition he created sometime in the last several years. He clicks on one to open the file and a page pops up that’s filled with bars — some long, some short, each representing a different instrument.
Andreas Jahn early in his music career
With Logic Express, Jahn can compose tracks that mix piano with strings with horns with percussion. He has dozens of instruments ready at his fingertips, and despite his young age, he’s had years of practice putting them together.
Jahn has been composing music since he was 5. Not long after he started learning to play piano, he began composing his own pieces. His dad introduced him to GarageBand, which opened up a new world of composition.
“Of course they were really simple, but that’s when I first realized this is really fun,” Jahn says. “When I was like 7 or 8, that’s when I began actually writing, instead of just using GarageBand samples. I began thinking of actual chords on the piano, writing songs and writing lyrics for them.”
Around that time, he graduated from GarageBand to Logic Express, which is the program he still uses today.
His early songs were largely influenced by his love for The Beatles, XTC, The Shins and They Might Be Giants.
“They were all really similar sounding songs,” he says. “Even though I might have imagined them differently, they all used a lot of the same chords.”
More recently, his older brother began attending Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and introduced him to jazz and jazz fusion.
Armed with new music appreciation, Jahn began crafting his own style. As he completed songs, he grouped them together, and soon he had an entire playlist. Earlier this year, he released his first album, “Beyond Slumber,” which is available on CDBaby.com and iTunes.
