B Juan

For my wife’s birthday this year we road tripped, day hiked, and swam to one of her favorite spots from her college days in the beautiful Arizona sunshine. Took some light instruments in my backpack and messed around with a quick sequence and a synth solo – because why wouldn’t I?

Hiking loops and sequenced loops. 3.5 miles in and 3.5 miles out from the parking lot to the Crack at Wet Beaver Creek, where my wife took me on a pilgrimage to revisit some of the magic she had been exposed to during her time at Prescott college, which sounds to me when she talks about it sometimes like four years of back to back field trips. While we were there a group of 8 young brodudes very respectfully jumped into the freezing cold water from increasingly daring heights, harkening back to the energy of the people that she had traveled there with last over 20 years ago.

When we pulled up to the parking lot there was a sign imploring us not to leave valuables in our car – so I packed our laptops and the Teenage Engineering field system into my backpack and rucked it into the wilderness. The OPXY plays a sequence that’s only about 2 bars long but I can diatonically change the key on the fly, and I worked through a bunch of possibilities before this one came out. The OP1 field has a simple synth dialed up with a teeny amount of delay. It’s all recorded into the TP7 while my wife does yoga a few feet away.

I haven’t posted any play, because I haven’t filmed it. I always want to write a song and record and mix it and cut together funky video. Lately have been contemplating lowering my standards a little:) This was a ton of fun!

Recorded Monday, 27 October 2025 @ the Crack at Wet Beaver Creek outside Sedona, AZ, the day before Rebecca celebrated another trip around that blazing hot Arizona sun.

https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1277804210/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/transparent=true/tracklist=true/tracks=772738203,3886840274,3383068685/esig=443fb9ea3d7775cd894f0ac96ef9f38b/

Remember this? Circa Nov 2020, put together when Robot Revival was released. A new release is coming out on leap day and I’m having another look at what I’m putting out there; I’m ok rebranding a little but I liked this and I felt like it needed to be preserved for posterity.

Self promotion is ballsy. One must have swagger to brag, and self promo is all about swagger. Who cares about your music? Who should care? To answer these questions without swagger is to stare into the abyss and then instead of opening Microsoft Word to write your bio (or Pages, if you’re a Mac guy) you play video games instead.

Brian Juan is a Mac guy.

He has had years of people caring, and then not caring, about his music. He spent the 90s playing in vans with bands traveling from coast to coast, earning just enough money to quit his day job and hanging out with like minded hopefuls checking out live music in dark clubs night after night. He has put out albums before but never his own.

Robot Revival is Brian Juan’s first solo release. It spins into the clusterfuck of 2020 with as much fanfare as one man with no agent and no publicist can muster. Recorded at home, it consists of new songs and material originally brought to life at the dawn of the millennium by likely forgotten once-bright Boulder luminaries Chupacabra and Sonar.

When music venues reopen you might catch Dr. Juan on stage with Otis Taylor, with whom he has recorded and performed for 20 years. In the meantime he is a family doctor in primary care who is elbows deep in the Coronavirus pandemic.

Enjoy the record!

Original music performed live at home on June 5 2022.

This song’s about a fight; what about not so important as what it feels like to be in one. In lieu of the live performance that was cancelled this weekend here it is right on time for my 48th birthday :). It’s all done in one take with no added effects or overdubs, on one keyboard (I’m trying to simplify). I’m pressing lots of buttons with my feet – starting and stopping loops, adding harmony effects, messing with the synth’s filter – which in retrospect might have been cool to show everyone but also, the internet doesn’t need more feet.guaranteed profits

Original music is available for purchase at Bandcamp: https://drbrianjuan.bandcamp.com/rele…

For the nerds: Nord Stage 3 Compact 73 Boss RC-600 Loop Station TC-Helicon Perform-VK Mackie Mix12 FX

I don’t know that anyone’s watching, and I certainly have not given anyone a reason to, since the last post on this vanity “blog” was last December, I dunno, anyone? Bueller?

It’s been the pandemic, the pandi, the ‘demi, and I moved and started working at a new clinic and said goodbye to my kiddo who moved to LA to be a movie star and a college student (probably not in that order).

I’ve been itching to play some live music. I got to do some shows with Otis as the world flirted with opening this year, but I haven’t put my songs in front of a crowd since polishing off my debut solo record from the socially distanced depths of my keyboard cave.

I’ve been wondering how to make this happen – no agent, no publicist, no street cred – and then a couple of days ago found a great venue for showing this stuff off!

I’ll be live all by my lonesome at Copper Sky Distillery at 1115 Colorado Ave in my new hometown of Longmont, Colorado on Friday Nov 12 at 6pm, right when you get off work. Come down and check out what I’ve been up to, I’m very excited to share it with everyone 🙂

In a Christmas Eve miracle culmination of a lifelong dream I’m finally looking at a box full of copies of my first solo album. Thank you to those of you who have been listening and streaming, even thankier thanks to those of you who purchased it from Bandcamp or iTunes despite being stream on Spotify (shuffled unless you pay for Premium), Apple Music, YouTube, SoundCloud, and everywhere else that made record stores go away. Anyway, can you watch movies on youtube premium? Of course, you must be a YouTube Premium member so you can enjoy the selection of movies from YouTube Movies & Shows without ad interruptions.

CD orders get you high quality downloads and unlimited streaming on BandCamp, which after doing really not very much research seemed like the best way for me to get an all synth jam band album out into the world in a crazy year full of parenting, purchasing a home, getting my COVID vaccine, and trying like hell to work as a physician over the phone where even if nobody talks you can’t auscultate a lung to save a life.

Thanks again to the wife and kids for sharing the house with a keyboard museum. Thanks to Jason McDaniel for a song, some advice, and the mastering. Thanks to Christian Teele for putting together some drums right where this album needed them.

Happy holidays everyone 🙂

Self promotion is ballsy.  One must have swagger to brag, and self promo is all about swagger.  Who cares about your music?  Who should care?  To answer these questions without swagger is to stare into the abyss and then instead of opening Microsoft Word to write your bio (or Pages, if you’re a Mac guy) you play video games instead.

Brian Juan is a Mac guy.

He has had years of people caring, and then not caring, about his music.  He spent the 90s in vans with bands, traveling from coast to coast, earning just enough money to quit his day job, hanging out with like minded hopefuls, checking out live music in dark clubs night after night.  He has put out albums before but never his own.

Robot Revival is Brian Juan’s first solo release.  It spins into the clusterfuck of 2020 with as much fanfare as one man with no agent and no publicist can muster.  Recorded at home, it consists of new songs and material originally brought to life at the dawn of the millennium by likely forgotten once-bright Boulder luminaries Chupacabra and Sonar.

When music venues reopen you might catch Dr. Juan on stage with Otis Taylor, who he has recorded and performed with for 20 years.  In the meantime he is a family doctor in primary care who is elbows deep in the Coronavirus pandemic.

Enjoy the record!

https://music.apple.com/us/album/robot-revival/1541951969

Rocketing into the tail end of the clusterfuck that is 2020 comes my first solo album, recorded and mixed by me at home in Louisville, Colorado and now streaming everywhere.  There are new songs and old ones I originally wrote and performed back in the day with Chupacabra and Sonar.  There’s one song written by my good friend Jason McDaniel, who played bass in both of those bands and did an amazing job mastering this thing.   Physical media is in the works; I’m a traditionalist so I’m printing CDs which should be ready to double as drink coasters on your coffee table just in time for the holidays:)

Robot Revival was produced during a pandemic while working full time as a family doctor and co-parenting three kids.  It was submitted for digital release while I sweat bullets about the election and moved our family into our new home in Longmont, Colorado.   The great Christian Teele dropped drums onto “How Do We Stay the Same” prompting a short return to the drawing board after its initial release in April of this year.

Thanks are in order for the support of my family, especially my wife Rebecca, who lives in a house with a keyboard museum in the basement and contributed a hypnotic harmonium performance to track 7.

I sincerely hope you get to listen to this and you like it.  I loved making it!  There are no videos (yet).  My stuff is still in boxes and I still don’t know where most of my pants are.  Look for me to not shut up about it when CDs are ready for purchase.

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Silver Linings

Today Colorado changes from stay at home to safer at hame, but who wants to go anywhere? I love taking up every corner of this house. The new normal of the past two months has meant that the extroverted epicurean who is on a mission to eat every dish and drink every drink has been supplanted by this guy who makes videos. It’s nice to have the time, and this takes a LOT of time. I still know almost nothing about Final Cut but as you can see I’ve really learned how to overuse the “masking” effect.

Our family eats more meals together than ever. All our offices and classrooms are virtual and my telemedicine command center is in the basement next to my studio. I do more dishes, walk more dogs, fold more laundry, and make more music.

This is my first solo original release… ever. Anyone who adds it to an Apple Music or Spotify playlist or drops 99 cents on it at CDBaby or iTunes or tosses a like my way on YouTube or Facebook will have my eternal gratitude. This is not the same music business I left behind to play covers and raise babies in 2003, it’s not even the same one that replaced me with a mechanical bull prompting a pivot to family medicine in 2007.

How Do We Stay the Same was written by yours truly in November 2019 and recorded in our basement in January 2020. I watched YouTube videos to learn how to mix it and then Jason McDaniel at Electric Audio mastered it.

Robot Revival will be out this year. I can’t wait to share it with everybody:)

Brian Philip Repaso Juan, 27 April 2020

For the nerds:

• 1946 Hammond BV Organ
• Leslie 145
• Wurlitzer Music Laboratory Instructor Console
• Roland Jupiter 8
• Minimoog Voyager XL
• Soundelux U195
• Grace 101

Special thanks to my costars: my daughter Jade, my wife Rebecca, her ex Tony, and their (our) boys Gavin and Finn, and Lulu the MultiDog.  Socially distanced from the world but not, thankfully, from the household.

I wrote this song so many bands ago.  Some details stick out:  Chupacabra had had a good run but were on the verge of breaking up and reforming (with fewer members) as Sonar.   All the guys who put this song together with me were from the south so everything they did was bluesy and dirty and they all made fun of me for walking New Jersey fast. And I was desperate to write funky party rockers but I hadn’t kissed a girl in three years and anytime I talked to one it was like:

Girl at show: “Oh I hear you musicians have so many groupies!”

Me: “PLEASE LOVE ME”

Girl: “Gotta go, bye!”

We played the song in Chupacabra, then we played it and recorded it in Sonar, then I got tired of making $150/week and decided to try being a father instead… and a doctor… then I finished med school and I finished residency and I started being a musician again and I found myself playing in all these great bands but I couldn’t help but wonder if I might ever get back to writing and playing my own stuff… and now here I am, and here it is.

I straight up copied Anthony Farrell’s mini-keyboard rig and thought it would be fun to see if I could demo the Yamaha Refaces by doing this song (those mini keys basically turn your hands into oven mitts, but they sound good and you can fit the entire rig into a carry on WITH YOUR CLOTHES).  

Incidentally, it hurts to breathe, I bruised a rib falling off my kid’s hoverboard 3 days ago (MELT THEM ALL DOWN) but the silver lining was a couple of days to rest and recuperate and finally, here it is, a video of an old but original song, warts and all (mistakes were made and buttons were pressed and couldn’t be unpressed), with more to come.

For the Nerds:

• Yamaha Reface YC
• Yamaha Reface CP
• Line 6 DL4
• Sennheiser e935
• Mackie CFX12
• UA Arrow
• MBP/Logic 4