My Music - Overview
This section of my website is devoted to one of my greatest passions - making music. Ever since I bought a cheap Casio VL-Tone keyboard I became hooked on (trying) to make music. Though the VL-Tone was just a tiny, monophonic synth with very basic sound-shaping facilities, you could still get some weird sounds out of it if you really tried :) When you don't have much money you have to be inventive, so I would wrangle strange bleeps out of my ZX Spectrum computer, make weird tape loops on an old 8-track cartridge unit I found and improvise a reverb unit by placing a microphone inside a biscuit tin. If it could make or record sound, I'd find a use for it!
However, it wasn't until I borrowed a bass guitar from a friend at college that I became more serious about learning to play. Though the bass was horribly set-up I persevered and soon could manage to play a few rudimentary bass lines. Spurred on by this small success I then bought a very cheap electric guitar. Like many young boys I'd always wanted to play guitar and this was my chance. I never bothered with lessons or theory, adopting a more 'punk' attitude where I made it up as I went along. In retrospect this is probably not the best way to learn to play, but who cares? It's rock'n'roll, man!
Since then I've also bought all sorts of different stuff. I'll never forget my first drum machine, a Cheetah MD8, which I got very cheap. This was an 8-bit, fixed-velocity drum machine and you had to load the samples into it via cassette tape. I found out the reason I got it so cheap was that the supposedly non-volatile memory was, in fact, very volatile - so every time you switched it off it lost all sequences and samples (which had to be reloaded again from tape, if you've remembered to back them up). Check out the Music Equipment section of this site for a more detailed overview of the equipment I now own.
Section Contents
I've divided up the Music section of my website into the following categories :
- Bands - A short overview of the bands I've been in, with links to some sample songs
- MP3 Tracks - This page has available all the tracks I've made in MP3 format
- Equipment - Here you can find out more about the equipment and software I use
- Reason - A section devoted to Propellerhead's awesome virtual studio software
- Audio Mastering - Some tips and advice on how to properly master tracks for release
- Links - More music making websites and downloads
- diplo@ZeD - My contributions at ZeD (Open Source Television)
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon
