The Beginning

How My Music Got This Far Though Not So Far As All That.

When I was 12, my family received a 1935 Kimball upright piano for the price of moving it from someone’s basement. I wasn’t very excited about it at the time, as I had never had any music lessons and never considered myself very musical. But I would occasionally sit in front of that piano and mess around. My first bits of music were pretty poor. The only reason you might’ve thought they were supposed to be music was that the horrible noises coming out of that instrument sounded the same every time I made them. And while sound-patterns don’t always constitute music in any real sence, I thought MINE did. One day an organist/historical impersonator who performed as J.S.Bach visited my Lutheran grade school and played a bunch of Bach’s organ works on the church’s huge pipe organ. His performance seemed stunning to my little mind and from that day on I wanted to play and compose like J.S.Bach. I especially loved “Jesu Joy of Mans Desiring,” and desperately wanted to play that piece. I still have yet to be able to play that piece, but I did, at an early point, figure out how to play a tiny part of it. From that kernel of proto-music I discovered that if you play the notes that make up a chord seperately, one after the other, in an interesting pattern, it sounded pleasing to the ears. (Others who lived with me at the time might disagree with that assessment, but music is very subjective) From then on I slowly evolved my poor musical skills by working out chords and playing them out one eighth-note at a time in an interesting pattern. Then I would play those patterns with my left hand over, and over again, until they were burned into my synapses. Once I got to the point where I no longer had to think about what that left hand was doing, I would use my right hand to improvise a melody to go along with the eighth-note progression. Almost all my music started this way, and by the time I graduated high-school I had a number of pieces composed and somewhat playable. In 1991-1992 (I’m not sure which year it was) my brother Gerald and I bought a 486DX-33 Packard Bell computer from Montgomery Wards using my step-father’s charge card. I cought the computer bug and soon purchased a Creative Labs multimedia kit from a friend on Prodigy named Glenn Weber. I soon found myself dialing up the Creative Labs BBS and downloading a Finnish program called Musician I. It was a sequencing kinda program, but was strangly sound-card specific. It only worked with Sound Blaster OPL3 FM Synthesizers. Making music with It was a laborious process, as it forced you to sequence each individual voice seperately. And when I say "each individual voice" I mean one voice, not channel, at a time. In order to make a chord, for instance, you would have to program one note, switch to another voice, program the second note in the chord, switch to a third voice, program the third note in the chord, so on and so on.... But I was happy...for awhile. Eventually I grew frustrated with the slow pace of working within Musician I and prevailed upon my mother to assist me with the purchase of a Miracle keyboard and CakeWalk Pro version 2 for Windows. At that point I went MIDI (see Indigestion Prance for the first example of my MIDI tinkerings) but I have never equalled these Musician I arrangements in terms of fun. Take me Home