Welshrogue

One day, in my fantasy world that is, I will be interviewed about my musical influences. I’ll name Tangergine Dream, Moby, Jan Hammer and many other synth based musicians as my main sources of inspiration. This isn’t entirely true as any music I listen to inspires me. Right now, ‘You make loving fun’ by Fleetwood Mac is on the radio and there are parts of that song I would love to imitate in the future in one of my tunes. I love Def Leppard, Van Halen and other such guitar rock bands yet my own skill with the six string is such that when it comes to making music, its easier to use a keyboard (and mouse)

I find that I can start with a little peice of a tune and build on it until it has become this great big ‘thing’. This tune is a good example of it. I came up with the repeating pattern first on the guitar and then away I went. It has a guitar solo that I actually played (badly but still) and almost a verse/chorus pattern. When I re-mixed it, I through in some more guitars and changed the bass a little. It seemed to work better.

Original

Remix

As always, please feel free to leave constructive comments

I can’t say the first attempt as that track is lost in the distant past of my teenage years. The second attempt was made with Cakewalk and a lot of soundfonts.

Soundfonts are similar to normal computer fonts, the obvious different being that rather than changing how letters appear, they change the tone and timbre of notes created on the computer. While I haven’t looked for new soundfonts for sometime, there were plenty available for free when I did last update my collection. They can range from a very basic tone to multiple sampled drum sets. Some of the soundfonts are ultra realistic whilst others are perhaps not so professional. You need good sized memory to fully utilize soundfonts as they are loaded into memory before use.

The guitar solo at the start of the track was written by hand, and when I say hand I mean mouse as I was unable to actually play the solo. I used a guitar to slowly, and boy do I mean slowly work out the notes which I then put into the track one note at a time.

I like the changes the track goes through, although I have ‘remixed’ it since and added a lot more to the second half as well as replacing or updating much of it.

This is the original track

This is the ‘remixed track

When I were just a lad, there was a show on TV that I now vaguely remember to be titled something like Rock School or Rock Steady or something where some musicans explained all about making music. Not the dry and dusty way of reading music, knowing theory and so forth but actual music. I don’t remember too much about it other than the woman bass player was definatly more butch than the male drummer and in one episode they explained how by playing guitar connected to this magical cable you could control the sound coming out of the keyboard. Yep, this was my introduction to midi!

For those of you in the know, you already understand what midi stands for. Peace, justice and the American way……. nope, it actually stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. When you play a midi controller, be it a guitar, keyboard, drums, or even a violin, with the right hardware you can produce sounds not normally found on your instrument of choice. You could play guitar and the sound playing would be an organ. Why you would want your guitar to sound like a kidney is beyond me but there you go.

A famous example of the use of midi is Rick Allen, the one armed drummer of Def Leppard who used a midi based drum kit when he first began playing drums again after his accident.

Anyway, back at the ranch. The thought of midi and of using a computer to record the music which could then be played back, as many times as you wanted, perfect everytime just blew my mind.

The first computer I had that could do this for me was a Sinclair Spectrum, which once I figured out what I was doing controlled a little midi capable Casio CZ100 keyboard and a drum machine. No matter that the music had to be hand coded as a single line per note, it was worth it. I still remember the song I recorded. ‘I saw her standing there’, the Beatles classic sounded great, but nothing like the original! I was hooked.

Through various computers, software and instruments, I have tried to do more with midi and later on, with digital audio recording. I have actually written several tunes using a PC, Cakewalk and some plugins, which I will post as and when I find the time. I truly enjoy writing music, which is funny considering I dropped music while in school. I own several guitars but my playing level is pretty much inbetween crappy and useless. I can’t play piano or keyboards but I can use a mouse to place the notes where I want them. In a way, home recording helps me be the musician I always wanted to be.

Why am I telling you all this? Because hopefully by the end of the week, I should have a brand spanking new (why do you only get spanked when you are new?) hand built computer that will be able to handle any and all things I want to do when recording. Multiple ins and outs, a processor that won’t die if I play three tracks of audio at the same time and enough memory that can hold all the settings and samples I need. I can’t wait. I might even write some new stuff!