Music

I have always been interested in music, but have never taken it very seriously. When I was a kid, I had one of those Magnus Chord Organs that ran off an electric blower. In junior high school I played the Sousaphone in the Concert and Marching band. When I was a teenager, I got my first "real" organ, and played in a small town rock band. (The kind where you change the name of the band after every performance so next time they won't know it's you again!) The song that inspired me to get more serious on keyboards was In-a-gadda-da-vida.

I first started combining music and computers with my Atari 800 computer in 1981. The Atari Music Composer Cartridge, and later Lee Actor's Advanced Music System (AMS) took full advantage of the 800's four channel internal synthesizer. I used to spend hours programming songs into the computer note by note using sheet music as a guide. Many other Atarians followed suit so there were hundreds of files available. There was nothing else like it for the price at that time. It didn't take long before Lee went on to advance the technology by upgrading his AMS system to the MIDI Music System (MMS) in 1985. MMS allowed the Atari to drive a real MIDI interface to play songs through MIDI compatible keyboards! Lee was nice enough to include a conversion program to convert AMS files to MMS, so the work wasn't lost.

MIDI has really changed over the last 15 years. Almost every sound card used in today's computers contains a 128 voice synthesizer that couldn't be imagined in the mid 1980's. I still collect MIDI files, and tinker with them.

A couple of year's ago, Mike picked up a guitar and turned out to be a natural. As a result, I've been getting back in to it a lot more lately, and we've been working on building a home studio in our basement.

You can download one of my original songs, The Chatham Street Waltz, which I wrote in 1978, and 20 years later played and orchestrated using Cakewalk Home Studio. Any general MIDI player should be able to play it. You can also listen to one of my more recent compositions, Sonic Jam, which I played live at a local charity event, Lilyfest 2003, by clicking here (3.8Mb mp3 file.) With a little luck, there will be some new material soon.

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