my musical background
From
LaRRy LaGoMoRpH@GRUDGEDU to
All on Thu Apr 24 13:16:26 2014
hi musicalnet,
i know it's a little dead in here, so i thought i would write a little monologue, or maybe a long monologue, we'll see where it leads. i think i have a pretty lengthy history with music.
for the sake of expediency, my first real foray into music was learning to play bass at the age of 14, and my brother picked up the drums. i took bass lessons for like 3 years and i sucked for most of it. when i stopped sucking i stopped taking lessons. part of the reason i stopped sucking was i got a job at a musical instrument store, due to the things and people I was exposed to. for a couple years though, i sucked, real hard, couldn't even tune or tell if an instrument was out of tune. couldn't do anything really. the other thing that helped was my buddies got cars, and since we had a drum kit at my house, it was easy to get together and practice as a unit without a lot of pressure.
i got everything at the music store at or beneath wholesale price, and sometimes even greater bargains, so i started spending my paycheck back at the store. one day i impulsively got a cassette 4 track. played a few shows here and there. got a drum machine. a keyboard. microphones. i was 17 and this was 95. oh yah, and guitar. i was secretly becoming more of a guitar player.
i used to meet a fair amount of musicians at the store as well, usually on the way up or down, or plateau'd at a certain level. plenty of stories, plenty of people. slash came in drunk and got kicked out. i talked to the guys in bush about dog poop. i played the foam rubber guitar from gwar. i sold michael hedges guitar strings at least 5 times. the place was a 2 minute walk from the big nightclub, so people were always coming in.
when i went to college i had gone through some recording devices, including a reel-to-reel i regret ever parting with, to have settled on a mini-dis 4 track. through a series of events that just seemed to snowball, my dorm room became a recording studio for all sorts of folks. i will remember it most for the rap music that came out of that time that was intentionally comical, and sometimes lending out my dorm room for long stretches of time to this guy who wound up founding a music software company who said he discovered his passion in there. he knew how to use that mini-disc 4 track better than i. i never liked that thing, it was digital in all the wrong ways and media was expensive.
after sophmore year, i moved off campus and stayed the summer. strangely enough, the manager of the store i worked at in high school had been hired as the manager at the major store in the town where i went to school, right next to the big nightclub. i think i went in there one day and saw him and he asked me to work there. wasn't looking for a job, but i had one and i pretty much knew what to expect. so it was more the same.
i lived in the same place for about 5 years, and my studio became more based around hard disk recorders, and I accumulated them and got a little out of control perhaps with syncing them together. I had 3 roland hard-disk 8 tracks sync'd up to another korg 16 track, that allowed me to record from 32 sources at once. i wasn't really using a computer around this time, i did not trust them as much as these dedicated devices. i'm still getting around to saying i'm good with working in today's modern computer based audio workstation. only the korg had waveforms. the rolands were terrible interfaces, but i knew how to use them. i used to routinely make 100 bucks an hour going to people's houses and teaching them how to use those things. the korg was easy, i got it for free for selling a certain number of them, and i just used my own experience as a roland user to sell them the product. korg had awesome spiffs. i also got a free ER-1 Rhythm Synthesizer from korg, which i use all the time these days. maybe i'll talk about that in a little bit, i got it a long time ago, but it's not too relevant at this point in the story.
since i was off campus, the first coupple years of this new living arrangement could be euphimized as an "experimental phase." lets just say we had drums and we weren't worrried about the proctors. if you had drums, we would get together and play and enjoy the experience. we didn't worry about making commercial hits or getting shows, but occasionally we tore up the party. i didn't usually bring my own drums but encouraged people to share their drums.
after graduating, i stayed in town, and some new folks moved in and lured me into what was probably the most serious band i've been in, or at least as far as resources and what we wanted to be. for once i wasn't the only one in the band who had an interest in gear or trying to refine something. we had a couple of places to practice, real places. we even had a tour van, a brand new ford extended van that sat 8 and had a cargo space for the gear. it was sweet. the front man was willing to invest in making it. we played a few shows, recorded a few songs. some better than others, some classic.
eventually though i think we decided we wanted to do different things, and I think I got burnt out on bands a little bit, epecially playing bass or dealing with front men (lead singers and rappers). i started to try to write less experimental music and catchier music. i moved out of a house and into an apartment, and wasnt as actively involved in music for a bit, in a good way. most of my studio equipment was in my parent's garage and i focused more on doing my own songwriting.
anyhow, i'm tired of writing now, so consider this part 1. there's at least 10 more years to be covered. maybe i'll finish...
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