Tuesday, November 23, 2010

A long time ago, on a hard drive that crashed far, far away, I and my sister's 486 DX4 100MHz computer made music together. Sweet, lovable "electronica" created with a variety of programs. Eventually, I did end up getting a computer of my own which was a Pentium 233MMX based system, which I upgraded to the Celeron 300a system that I had over-clocked to 450MHz for a good three years I believe. Anyhow, on this modest hardware I some pretty neat things, back in the 1990s and early 2000s when I still had some creativity left in me. 

The primary program that I used was a DOS based "tracker" called Impulse Tracker. It was a created by a nice guy named Jeffery Lim, who sadly was pushed away from updating IT by the advancing of time and by the pressure of writing code for his ever increasing (and demanding) fan base. I also had access to Sound Forge, Rebirth, and Reason for a time and they allowed me to make some really great samples and loops to use later on in IT. Absolutely of note is a little program that played the and output the IT files (.mod) called XMPlay. XMPlay ran in Windows 98 and allowed me to do something pretty amazing when I made a song in Impulse Tracker, I saved multiple versions with only a single "instrument" playing as wave files using XMPlay, which then allowed me to later use Sound Forge to clean up or modify each "track". After I had each "track" wave file just the way I wanted them I mixed them all together to make a completed song. As effect as this method was, I only ever did it a handful of times, with Cascade being the best example of the technique. 

Back in high school I was known as "The Sound Guy" for grades 11, 12, and OAC, a moniker I earned for my work transporting, setting up, tearing down, and designing sound systems for the school board and some community productions. I even laid some duct tape at the Cardinal Carter School for Performing Arts in Toronto, before performing in a community production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Anyhow, none of this translated in me gaining any kind of understanding of music (including how to read and play it at the same time) beyond the sage advice of a friend, "it's all just theme and variation". I played the guitar and tooted a harmonica, but in the end I just didn't have the discipline or the "scene" to really move forward and accomplish anything when it came to music. 

In fact, what is most clear to me now is that what I enjoyed was the community and the challenge of building and tweaking the systems; Actually making music was just proof that, yeah, the system works! Before my father passed away and life fell apart, I helped some friends record some of their own music and even though the fidelity of the recordings were in some cases God awful, there was some quality music to be had. 

It's been almost ten years since I sat down to make poetry with sound. Things have changed a lot in my life and of course, computer hardware and software has moved on. Not being one who bought into the Macintosh line of computers, I can't say what they have to offer. However, if I were to make some more music these days I'd take the time to learn MadTracker 2 and the wave/mp3 editor called Audacity. Both are free programs that are essentially modern versions of the software I was using way back when. They also work great in Windows 7 Home Premium. Being an adult now, I'd likely also take a trip up to Toronto to visit my sister and come home with a modest Rolland or Yamaha midi keyboard something I always wished I had. In any event, I honestly don't have (and haven't had for years) the sheer volume of uniterupted hours of quiet and concentration that it takes to make music these days. Maybe, but not likely. 

Below you will find links to my favorite of the songs that I have made (mp3 format). Feel free to download and share them. Sadly, I had not one, but two Fujitsu hard drives crash within months of each other and I lost most of the IT and wave files that I used make the mp3s, but I was lucky enough that between my friends and my website at the time, I was able to save at least the final products. Too bad really, because listening to them there are a lot of little things I could have cleared up, such as the distortion in Smiles that was caused by a bad normalization.


Download the Songs Here:

Cascade
Smiles
Welcome Forgotten
Casual Illusion
Motions of Time
Wish (Long Version)
Smile Simplified
All About Focus
Sea Clown
Ritztomb
Morning Star
Mara's
My Best Song
Leamer Dance
Harmony Arms
Passing Grafton
The Drifting Unfurl
Made at Night