ANYWAY this is a long winded roundabout way of saying that I always wanted to learn keyboards but never did, but have seriously dabbled for as long as I can remember. I had one of these suckers...
The Casio VL-1, curse of many a maths teacher when you'd turn up with one in class, and accidentally hit the 'demo' button instead of using the thing's built-in calculator. Remember that crunchy little backbeat that used to accompany the "Ariston" ads? That was one of the basic rhythms from this thing.
A few years later I also bought one of these:
The Casio SK-5 - With SAMPLING! Yes you too can sample yourself saying "Fuck" and then play a whole spectrum of different low and high pitched versions of yourself saying "Fuck" pretending you were making music. Samplers were very much a thing in the 1980s, and if you've ever listened to "I Can't Wait" by Nu Shooz you'll probably know what I'm on about when I talk about sampling. Of course today everyone samples everyone else, and throws AI into the mix as well, so nothing's sacred.
When I was in a band (and learning guitar), I bought a series of drum machines - mostly the sort you'd whack with a real pair of drumsticks or set up to just bash out a basic rhythm (our band only had a drummer for a brief period of time before he sadly died of a brain haemorrhage so we had to make do with these instead):
It made a good enough semblance of a bass and snare noise, and was very satisfying to thwack.
I also picked up one of these:
This was my first introduction to sequencers. This tiny little pocket-sized marvel had great drum sounds and let you build your own (fairly short and rigid) sequences of bass, drums and even synth patterns. Sadly I never got the best out of the thing and ended up selling it on for less than I paid for it (always the way).
I never really learned how to play the piano or even knock out a basic scale but at some point in the 1990s, when I first owned a half-decent PC I picked up a copy of this:
A tenner for a music sequencer? Heck yeah I'll have some of that. Dance Ejay was the equivalent of having a very limited lego set for basic music creation. Basic being the operative word as this software was pretty much a closed loop. You *could* just about squeeze your own audio loops into the thing but they would never line up with whatever else was in there - But the user interface was nice and easy to figure out.
I left all this stuff alone for a number of years, but recently I kept thinking about the fact that I had three apple devices, each with a copy of Garage Band on them. Garage Band being a free sequencer that allowed you to create the kind of music you can hear in the charts? Sign me up!
I spent a whole weekend noodling around with the iPad version (which is fairly user-friendly if a bit awkward to use) and the Mac version (which is a lot less user-friendly but more powerful in terms of what you can hook up to it - for example you can plug in your real-world instruments and record audio directly into the thing but boy, your timing had better be good pardner!)
This all came about because, in the hot weather, my creative insomniac brain couldn't sleep one night and this bizarre song came to me as I was trying to sleep. The next morning I could still remember the tune and the lyrics so I was determined to try and 'record' it somehow.
The lyrics were filthy (in my dream) so I opted for a slightly cleaner 'radio edit'. But there was a problem here. I cannot sing to save my life, and would have to record my horrible voice singing the lyrics / lead before I could strap anything else around it. So on the iPad I used the built-in microphone (I know, scream if you want to) and recorded the main lyric with a metronome accompaniment to try and keep me in time, and the monitor function switched on so I could hear my horrible caterwauling.
The best thing about Garage Band is that you can immediately filter and alter your horrible voice into something more palatable. Thanks to the 60s Phaser filter and a shitload of autotune, I got a short 8 bar sequence recorded.
From there it was ridiculously easy to bash keyboard and drums around it using Garage Band. Surprisingly (for Apple), you get a huge chunk of instruments, loops, drum kits and samples for free but you'll very quickly realise that the biggest draw is bringing in your own audio (hopefully from a better source than the crappy built-in microphone on your iPad.
It's horribly addictive all this, and of course hugely time consuming (why is it that everything I find an interest in is the same? Does this say a lot about me?) - It got me googling for keyboard controllers and other music-production type stuff and I very quickly realised just how ludicrously cheap stuff is compared to the 1990s when I was noodling around with this stuff back then. For the time being though, Garage Band and a bit of terrible crooning will do me.
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