by Kenneth Myers

Created on: May 20, 2007

I began my musical hobby playing guitar back in 1971. I was a big Jimi Hendrix fan and I had all the noise and fuzz boxes necessary to try to emulate his sound. My younger brothers served as my backup band, with one on bass guitar another on rhythm and another on drums. We drove our parents nuts with the noise, but we learned how to interact as a band and eventually developed pretty good timing. We were all self taught, grabbing all the knowledge we could from books, tapes, and watching others play. As a band we weren't half bad, and we actually learned how to pen our own songs.

Eventually I tried composing alone. I bought a four-track Tascam recorder (most popular at the time for home recordists) and learned how to multi-track. By the time drum machines became affordable by 1978-1980 I invested in one and a keyboard synthesizer (after having used a Casio 'toy' keyboard with rhythm presets and enjoying the results).I knew these were very powerful tools to shape compositions with. I heard artists like Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder use them.Of course I had to learn how to play keyboards as well because at best all I could get was a few beeps and basic chords like c-Maj.
I wont get into a long story about my theory education but I will say that it is essential for any musician who wants to compose music alone at home by midi sequencing. There are books available on Midi sequencing in general (as in midi instrumentation,panning techniques,voicing limitations or polyphony, and most importantly how to capture certain nuances of different instruments). Nowadays the sequencers are much more powerful. I have always used Cakewalk software because it is fairly easy to set up, something a beginner would appreciate. It takes a while to develop timing and techniques needed for a lone musician to sound like a band or even longer to sound like a full blown orchestra if that is desired. Even for well educated musicians midi sequencing can be a bit of a challenge. What's more, sequencing original songs can be challenging as well. I once asked an experienced jazz keykoardist to write an original tune on his built-in keyboard sequencer (an Ensoniq EPS 16-track) only because he criticized me for not composing and playing exclusively in the jazz idiom. What he brought me was an 'arrangement' of him improvising throughout an entire set of jazz figures with apparently no central theme or melody structure inherent in conventional 'songs.' So creating good AABA structures in original

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>