(soft electronic music) - I just grew up fishing, right?

As a kid, I just been fishing all my life.

Although it was fun, you fished to stock the freezer, right, so there'd be food there.

My dad was a teacher, my mom was a teacher, so you had two professionals, and yet we had a garden on the side of the house, and we were fishing every summer, stocking the freezer.

Although we didn't really need it economically, it was a part of my culture.

There's never any question of where food was coming from.

I make my own fishing tackle and I test it on the river.

And then, you know, I take it and then sell it online.

If you have a fishing tackle company, a lot of times they'll name it after the waters on which the lures and things were designed, and so since I'm here on the Black Warrior River, West Central Alabama, that's where I came up with Black Warrior Lures.

(soft electronic music) The difficult thing is people think I was in the Army or something.

(chuckling) (motor whirring) And my dad didn't learn to fish from his dad, he learned it from a friend, but he passed it on to me, and so I guess that's one reason I do YouTube, take what I've learned and pass it on to others.

My dad used to make these little fishing corks, or floats that we call 'em, and I decided to make some one week, and I went fishing with 'em, and they worked well, and I thought, I wonder, would anybody wanna buy these?

So I just put 'em on eBay.

But what happened was people would always ask, "How do I use the daggum things?"

Because they're not, they're a little bit, they're not intuitive.

So I saw YouTube as a way to teach my customers how to use the products that I'm making for them.

My early videos were horrible, absolutely horrible.

I hate 'em.

I just, I leave 'em up there, but I absolutely hate 'em.

Since I started sort of studying filmmaking, or trying to understand this whole other art and expression, so I really wanted every single fishing adventure that I do to at least in some way look like a documentary film.

I have a background in music, graduated at the University of Alabama, and I got hit with like, a copyright claim from YouTube.

(chuckling) I'm like, so I have a license to use this music.

And (chuckling) so I said, forget this.

I've got two degrees in music, I'm gonna put the degrees to work.

And so at that point, I started, I said, "I'm just gonna start composing all my own music."

I decided I was gonna probably do electronic music, but somewhere along that search, I found out about this thing called a modular synthesizer.

If you go back and watch old videos of like, the jazz fusion group, like Weather Report, you see Joe Zawinul with a keyboard, but the keyboard was attached to this big monstrosity and he's got all these knobs and all these wires.

And I found out that this technology had kind of experienced a resurgence.

This old technology had come back.

That's where I decided, well, maybe I can just think more like a composer and less like a performer.

You're kind of a composer, arranger, slash conductor.

You know, you're kinda doing all those.

But it is a kind of what I would call process music, and that process is playing out.

But it's not like I'm separate from the process.

You know, I gotta still manipulate, I gotta twist, I gotta patch, I gotta tweak.

But I just compose the tunes and I almost always have a patch ready or I almost always have a tune going, and I just record the tunes.

Once I get about seven tunes recorded, I just put 'em together and put 'em on an album on Bandcamp, and I sell it under the Creative Commons license so people can buy it, and actually download it, and use it in their YouTube videos.

And I've got, what, 23 albums?

Most of those are seven tunes per album, some of 'em a little bit more, and I have a couple of singles out, but 23 releases, so it's a nice little library that's been built up.

(soft electronic music) I grew up in Selma, Alabama.

And I grew up fishing along the Alabama River.

So I learned a lot from my dad, also learned a lot from my brother.

Then once I went to college, you know, you're just sort of, you just sort of get absorbed into whatever it is you're studying, and that just sort of becomes your life.

So that's why I didn't fish.

I got done with college, I went to graduate school as well.

I was just outta school, and you know, trying to find work, couldn't find work.

I always had a sort of a fascination with canoes.

I'd been wanting to build a canoe with my dad.

I said, "Ah, this would be a good way to spend more time with my dad, you know.

I'm done with school or whatever, and maybe can get back into fishing that way."

But my dad died, and that was 2007.

I was just faithless, and hating the world, and kind of wishing everything would die, you know?

And then I just, one day I just said, "Forget it, I'm done.

Forget this."

I just said, "I'm going fishing."

(line reeling) There we go.

No, it's a little, a little catfish, actually.

When I was a kid, all we knew is what we knew and what was locally available.

We didn't have a way to see what somebody's doing on the Jordan River in the Middle East, right, or doing in another river across the state.

There's no geographic boundaries anymore.

I mean, I'm on this sort of backwater river, West Central Alabama.

The way I fish is not popular, you know, it's not what they're using in the bass tournaments.

If it's not popular, how in the world do you find people who are interested?

Well, people are out there looking.

There are people out there searching for, okay, how do I fish with just a line in my hand?

I said, "Well, wait a minute, you know, my dad did a lot of woodworking, he made clocks and worked with resins and things."

Said, "I should be able to make one of these just outta wood."

So I started, I bought a lathe, and you know, kind of experimented, and eventually came up with a design pretty much like this one.

Almost all look like this now.

This is southern yellow pine.

Whatever's happening telegraphed directly to your hands.

It, when you're with the rod, the rod sorta dampens it or something.

I can't explain it.

(motor whirring) Here we go, hold on.

There we go.

Wait a minute, yeah, there we go.

(chuckling) Little guy.

(chuckling) Little striped bass.

It's a minimalist system.

It's just the line, the weight, and some bait.

Simple, it doesn't cost a lot, and you can catch a lot of fish with it, and that's why I love it.

(soft electronic music)