An amateur musician and his equipment
Couldn’t resist trying a quick embed. I believe all the sound in this “test” recording came from my Roland V-Synth XT. It was only testing a concept of a cover recording of the Commodore 64 theme song written by Rob Hubbard for the game Thrust. This is very much slowed down and what I’d call “industrial” in nature. Very noisy due to bad, quick, multi-track recording method.
More about the hardware soon. Possibly next post. Probably next weekend.
OK, it’s time for the first “gear” post. For the most part these will be about a single piece of equipment, sometimes including anecdotes of experiences using it, problems or issues where appropriate, reasons for getting it, and anything else that comes to mind.
Whilst I did use MIDI to hook up my PSS-680 and later PSR-420 to my early computers at a certain point I decided I wanted something “better”. Why? So whilst the PSR-420 had full size keys over the PSS-680 mini keys, it had no pitch bend, which the PSS-680 did have. Neither had a modulation wheel or other “real time” controllers.
Evolution was a company/brand that started with keyboards mainly dedicated for educational usage, but about the time I wanted something for computer sequencing they had a small range of USB controller keyboards, the “flagship” of sorts being their MK-361C.
From humble beginnings…
The start is usually a good place to begin, but what start do I choose?
Let’s go WAY back.
The first musical instrument that I know I “attacked” was a grandparent’s piano. On one side of my family my grandparents had an upright piano. It sat in the front room of a narrow terrace house (probably the steepest staircase I’ve ever experienced) and going increasingly out of tune and a few problems with the mechanisms inside. Both of these grandparents played to a certain extent, and though rare it was a joy to watch them play.
