about

John Janigan-Mills is a bassist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, sound designer, programmer, game dev, and human currently based in K’jipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia.

If there are sounds being made, harmonious or abstract, John is likely to be involved. After spending his high school years studying with Nova Scotia jazz legend Skip Beckwith, he earned a scholarship and studied Jazz Composition and Electronic Music Production at Berklee College of Music in 2014, entering as a sophomore and completing four semesters. During this time, he studied bass, composition, and musicianship with veteran musicians like Gary Willis, Victor Wooten, Whit Browne, Susan Hagen, Eddie Gomez, Michael League, and Liam Wilson.

After leaving Berklee in 2016, John set off on a journey to explore the rich intersections of engineering and music. Following his interest in electrical engineering, he became infatuated with the flexibility and accessibility of software, sparking years of study in audio, game, and systems programming, while working in music production and performance in the studio and stage.

John has a wide range of experience; from composing and producing charming, quirky indie film soundtracks with a single microphone, to creating interactive systems and sounds for games and multi-media projects. He smoothly pivots from recording solo artists and ensembles, to playing various rhythm section instruments across a wide range of genres and eras.

Music & Sound Portfolio

Technical Portfolio

Strat-Edgy Game Framework (Unity)

Multiple perspectives, realistic sound propagation and occlusion using pathfinding, detailed light and vision detection, modular character and action component structure, extensible procedural animation system, and generative aleatoric music system integrated with Wwise.

Cosmic Clipper VST Plugin (JUCE / C++)

Decimate your audio with independently selectable and adjustable bi-polar clipping algorithms!

Musical Transformation Language (C# / Python)
[MTL]

A framework? A language? C-dom-7 times two = Bb-aug-maj7-sus2???

This project is still in its infancy, but ultimately what I hope to create is an expressive and fun creative tool for analyzing and visualizing music harmony, as well as providing a powerful API for use by other programmers to create music theory based software.

At its core, MTL is a distilling of 12-tone Western music theory into a small set of mathematical relationships. These relationships describe a combination of: the infinitely scalable, micro-tonal, relativistic pitch spaces explored by experimental electronic artists, and cyclical pitch spaces like the Tonnetz. When put together, they form a model that describes Western harmony as an infinite, non-repeating, discretized pitch space that you can reason about and explore using numerical primitives, algebra, geometry, and physics.

Directly based on the work of Dr. Elaine Chew and the Teoria music engine, and greatly inspired by the theories, systems, and music created by George Russell, Barry Harris, Herbie Hancock, Olivier Messiaen, and Jacob Collier.

Guitar Pedals

Hacky analog experiments with and without micro-controllers.

Current Projects

Contact

eastcoastjohnbass,,
\\at//
gmail,,
//dot\\
com