Old tape recorded/created music
Two good quality tape decks were used. The tape motor speed was increased for greater fidelity.
A trim potentiometer was neeeded to match the tuning precisely for each playback.
And a further trim for the tape bias as the tone could change radically over many repeat playbacks.
1. An extemporisation in the style of Gabrieli. 3,320 k.
Several sound modules were connected together each time this was over-dubbed. Included was a d20 roland keyboard, a cheap Kawai module, a d50 roland module, and a Roland
S20 sampler. This early sampler is marginal by todays standards, being only 12 bit with limited control over the samples. The main mens voices used in that sampler were this person
singing 'aah' in a variety of tones overdubbed many times. Women were sampled from various 'voices' created on the D20.. Brass from D20 . There were perhaps 4 over-dubbs
altogether. I had very little in the way of audio effects available then. The multiple taping with some plain reverberation seemed to be quite effective though.
One great invention for the electronic set up of this period was a volume foot pedal I made with a light sensitive resistor ( to avoid noise of bad potentiometer contact). It made it possible
to get some extra expression into the sound.
2. Whistling ditty. 1,656 k.
An original short tune which still amuses the author, making him think it could be a theme tune for some older British TV comedy .
Interestingly this made much use of a Yamaha mini keyboard whose sounds came entirely from simple 2 wave FM modulation.
At least it had a few interesting chord/rythmn patterns, one of which was used here.
All done extempore on a bright saturday morning. The joys of youthful energy! Just went through a half dozen times , and the brain had sorted out all the parts and recorded them.
Brass parts were made using the FM synth. The whistle was an amazingly good, totally synthetic ( not sampled) sound, created on some old casio machine. I don't understand how I did
this! I have been unable to match the whistle on much more sophisticated synths.
3. The happy pipers. 1,230 k. Original ...was extemporised in the first instance. More youthful innocence on Saturday morning. This is a slight upgrade of the earlier (blurry) tape dubbed version. Again, it used a pattern from the mini Yamaha keyboard. Not very 'advanced' ( like all my music! ) but I rather like the middle alternate section.
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There are many more of these taped efforts, and original music ideas ( some 20 cassettes worth! ) but most are not up to today's standards. If I get enthusiastic may join many together
many short extracts into one long file.