about this site

Welcome to rkingston.com, where there's more than you'd ever care to know about percussionist and graphic designer Ray Kingston. The construction of the site is wrapping up, but here's most of it.

how this all started

...Why don't they recognize this song?!? Everyone knows this song...

"Okay guys, one more time!"

Rat-tat-tat-tat Rat-tat-tat
Rat-tat-tat, Rat-tat-tat

My family was so patient with me. I didn't know they couldn't hear the melody to Mary Had a Little Lamb. I could hear it. As a ten-year-old pounding out the rhythm to a famous nursery rhyme on his new student-model snare drum, I thought my parents were numb to not recognize it. But it didn't discourage me.

I recently saw some home movies that revealed I used to pound on the surface of water when I was a baby. Maybe it was because I wanted to splash, but it looks like the tendencies of a future percussionist were evident in my first year of life.

However, nine years lapsed between my water-drumming experiences and my student snare drum. My first artistic endeavors actually began on paper. I used to draw all the time, but at the end of my fourth grade year someone came to class to recruit people for band. I thought it sounded interesting, but I wanted something easy, so I chose drums. Ignorance is bliss.

So, dropping the pencil, I dove into music face-first, and I've been stuck ever since. Following some constructive music education in junior high and high school, I took every opportunity I could to play with as many people as possible, under every circumstance afforded to me. At a Massachusetts community college, I had the fortune of great teachers and ensembles.

But I wasn't quite ready for college yet, so I took a break. I learned a lot about people and life while working full time at various jobs, still playing with different groups as much as I could. I joined a drum and bugle corps (perhaps the single most life-changing event of my life), aged out, then taught there. I then went back to college at a Connecticut university, again for music, where I was given opportunity after opportunity. I took advantage of every offer I could. I received a research grant and studied tabla in Kolkata (Calcutta), India for a summer. The university jazz combo I was in competed in Chicago, and I performed in Carnegie Hall, NYC, in the university wind ensemble.

It was also at college that I rediscovered my interest in visual art. Right around the same time of this rediscovery, I got involved in computers and technology. After years of ignorantly rejecting computer-assisted arts, I learned more about them through mere experimentation, and now most of my design and composition is computer-based. Go figure.

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