Musings (1995-98)
In 1995 I bought a Roland MIDI keyboard, some sequencing software (Trax, I believe), and a Fostex 4 track cassette recorder. The first song I created started out with me just playing a simple repeating pattern on the keyboard with a guitar patch and recording that into the sequencer. Then I played a melody using a strings patch and added a voices patch. I then spent a lot of time editing the MIDI data (using the piano scroll metaphor interface in the sequencer) so that I could correct the multitude of mistakes I'd made playing the keyboard (I'm not a pianist). The end result was the song Air Born. It is first in the list of songs on this album because it was my first effort.
Before long I graduated to a more sophisticated sequencer (Studio Vision Pro) and produced the rest of the songs in this collection. During this process I discovered BIAB and employed it for drums and other backing tracks for some of the songs. It's hard to remember what parts were BIAB and what parts I played, and the files are no longer around, so I can't really illuminate the listener as to what is what, but I know I played in all of the lead melody parts and of course I sang all the vocals. I bounced the instrumental tracks to the Fostex and sang the vocals into that device. It was tricky but loads of fun!
The result was Musings. All tracks but Awakening were produced in 1995. I created Awakening for a friend's website circa 1998. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to play on his website anymore.
I Wanted You To Go is a partial rewrite of the first song I ever wrote (1978). By 1995 I'd lost the lyric sheet and could only remember two verses, so I rewrote the third verse. In 2024 I found a recording of the original version, which was originally named Gotta Have Someone, and liked the original third verse so much that I had to re-record the song with that verse as the third verse and the 1995 third verse as the fourth verse.