From Childhood Music Making to Publishing Instrumental Tracks Online: Part 1
Early childhood experiences and how computers made my life easier
Introduction
My music-making journey is quite a long one, so I’ve split the story into two.
This first part begins with my childhood musical experiences and how computers made things easier. It ends when I was first thinking of publishing music online, which is where part two begins.
Contents
Uninhibited music-making during childhood
Using early home computers to make music
Better technology, but less time
I bought my dream keyboard 15 years too late
Software-based virtual studios changed everything
Having unlimited possibilities can be overwhelming
To be continued
Related stories
Uninhibited music-making during childhood
I’ve been interested in making music all my life. As a child in the 1970s, I had a lot of fun playing the reed organ, although I’m not sure what my parents thought!
I was heavily influenced by experiences, and most of the early tunes I played were ‘uncool’ songs from school or church, such as ‘Morning Has Broken’ and ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam’.
My sister had guitar lessons and gave me her old one when she outgrew her first one. Most of the time, I was just experimenting with simple riffs, but I also remember practising the bass line from Summer Nights.
I wasn’t afraid for people to hear me in my younger years, and remember amplifying my acoustic guitar by placing a microphone inside it and connecting it to a modified record player!
I’ve never been able to read music, but if I practised a tune for long enough, I could just about play it without any mistakes.
Unfortunately, if I didn’t play for a couple of days, I’d be back to making lots of mistakes again the next time. That’s why I’ve never had the confidence to perform in front of others.
My sister taught me one of the songs she’d learned. I don’t know the name of it, but I still remember the tune — even though it would take me a while to recall how to play it today.
In 1981, I was excited to switch from my reed organ to the Yamaha PS-3 keyboard pictured above. It seemed so advanced when I was thirteen years old, and it was a wonderful Christmas present.
Although I went to the music shop to try out different models, my dad tricked me into thinking I was getting a lesser model in the range.
When I eventually got a computer that could record and edit music, it was a huge help to me. However, my first computers were not quite that capable.
Using early home computers to make music
When I had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum around 1983, I wrote some assembly language to create white noise and developed my own rudimentary drum machine software, just for fun.
My second computer was a Commodore 64, and I spent many hours programming the SID chip to play tunes. Once I started work, a colleague gave me some software called Music Studio, but I found it tedious to enter notes using a joystick.
In the late 1980s, I used my Commodore Amiga 500 with a program called Music-X and a homemade MIDI interface and sound sampler. I had a Yamaha PSS-680 keyboard followed by a PSS-790, and it was a lot of fun!
I would come up with musical ideas and record them in small pieces until I had a complete song. The computer software let me correct all my mistakes.
In many cases, I stopped after I had about 30 seconds worth of material because all the time spent recording and editing made me forget the ideas I had for the next part of the song. I would often start a new song before finishing my current one.
This was decades before knowing about autism and ADHD.
Occasionally, I would complete a longer tune of my own, or copy a song that I liked. I once spent ages working on an instrumental cover of ‘My Forbidden Lover’ by Chic.
As time went on, I had one or two other keyboards, but I always found it hard to avoid the ‘home keyboard’ sound. I longed to make something that sounded more like a commercial record.
Better technology, but less time
In the 1990s, better-sounding equipment was more affordable.
I installed a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold sound card in my PC and used Cakewalk software to generate some impressive and high-quality sounds.
By then, I’d moved out of my parents’ house and was married, so a lot of time was spent with my wife or working on the house.
With limited free time, I never did much music-making with that setup. If only I’d had such technology ten years earlier!
I bought my dream keyboard 15 years too late
Around 2005, I realised I’d been neglecting my interest in making music, and it felt like the years were passing very quickly. That prompted me to buy a Yamaha SY77, which was their flagship model way back in 1989.
I remember reading about it when it was new, and imagining how good it would be to own one, so it was exciting to finally buy one on eBay 15 years later.
Even though it had been my dream to own an SY77, the reality was somewhat different.
Being a big, heavy, professional-grade synth, it was nice to play, with a good feel to the keyboard. It could also generate a wide variety of amazing sounds. However, it was not as quick and convenient to configure as a computer-based setup.
Having two young children meant my free time was even more limited, so I never quite got around to exploring the SY77 in any great depth. The younger version of me would have spent every available hour learning every detail about it.
Software-based virtual studios changed everything
A few years after getting the SY77, I started using Reason software by Propellerhead on my PC.
Frustratingly, it did not support external synths at that point, so I ended up using my SY77 to do nothing more than control the software synths within Reason.
It felt very wrong to do that and ignore the SY77’s built-in sound generation capabilities!
With two growing children, space at home was limited, so I started using a small lightweight controller keyboard instead. The SY77 ended up being stored away.
Reason allowed me to ‘wire up’ all kinds of virtual synths, drum machines, and effects units on the computer screen. It didn’t take up any space, and all the settings could be saved and loaded in seconds.
Having unlimited possibilities can be overwhelming
Having almost unlimited possibilities for sound generation within the computer made it hard to decide what to do.
I would often come up with ideas for melodies and bass lines when I was in the shower, but by the time I was in front of the computer, I would have forgotten some of the details.
Nevertheless, before long, I created over one hundred intros and song ideas using Reason. While some were closer to complete songs than others, none were finished.
Somewhere, buried in the back of my mind, there was a desire to share some of that material with the world in the form of ringtones and complete tracks.
To be continued
Coming soon…
The second and final part of this story will talk about how I finished some of my music and published it online during my wife’s illness.
It will also include links to where you can still find the main tracks online today.
Thank you for reading 💛
Alan
Related stories
In April 2023, I wrote a short piece on Medium that touched on some of these topics:
Here are some of the articles on Medium about the old computers I mentioned here.