This is probably a ‘for musicians only’ post, but what the hell. I’m putting it out there anyway. It a different, if musical, documentation of one musician’s life… mine.
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In 1984, the life of most composers changed dramatically. January 24, 1984, the Apple McIntosh computer was introduced, and by mid-summer I had one. There was a music software company called Passport, in Woodenville, WA that developed and released a 4-channel MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) recorder for the new Mac.
Well, to those few composers in Atlanta, this was fairly earth-shaking! Unfortunately it didn’t shake much at first, as the computer and software had to be driven by a keyboard of some sort, and those were as yet undeveloped and toy-like, as were the computers themselves. Though decent synths were introduced as far back as ’69, they were still thought of as noise makers, mostly capable of beeps, buzzes and other-worldly spacial growls and moans. Only a few of us actually knew how to make music with them, and understood their potential.
The ARP 2500
I was working in a recording studio outside of Boston in 1969 when the first Arp synthesizer was developed. The Arp company picked our studio to display its first product, the Arp 2500, as we were, at the time, the largest recording studio in Boston at the time. Monty Stark, another engineer there at the time, and I began playing with it at night after work, and Monty especially got some great sounds (albeit strange at times) music with it. He ultimately released an album of his synth music, Stark Reality.
Me, at Natural Sound Studio, just outside Boston in ’71
Here is my first attempt at using it for music… the first song I ever wrote, Unless I’m In Love With You. Notice the bad drumming, that’s me, playing all the instruments and singing. I was able to double-track my voice since we had an 8-track Scully recorder, also the only one in New England at the time.
Because the whole concept was so new, I didn’t know what to do with it, really. I knew I had fallen onto the ground floor of a totally new musical concept, yet I lacked the foresight and perhaps the talent to attach myself to the development and marketing potential of this new musical product. Too bad, because it grew and spread so quickly, and others figured out how to grow with it and benefit from it.
The Arp Odyssey synth came out in ’72 and by late ’73 I bought one. It happened to by right around the time that I began getting calls from a little downtown studio, Doppler, to write a jingle for them, or play on a session. I brought my new synth, the Odyssey, with me once, we used it, and from that point on, if I got a call for a session, it was always, “and bring your synth.” That was easy to do, as it was light and portable.
The only usable sounds on it were simple, melodic sounds… a “sort of” French horn, a bass growl, a flutist thing and an ow ow sound. You could play only two notes at a time on it, so woodwinds and strings were out of the question. Even if we double-tracked the strings on the recorder, they sounded so cheesy they were rarely worth even pursuing.
The McIntosh computer finally appeared in 1984, giving us a new musical instrument to play with, develop and finally make a recordable musical instrument out of it. Unfortunately, it still depended upon the sounds that lay inside the outboard keyboard controller, and so many of their sounds were, well, cheesy, to say the least. So naturally we all went looking for the keyboard with the most realistic sounds. At first it was the Prophet 5, but soon it was replaced by the Yamaha DX-7, which was huge in finally bringing electronic music partially into the mainstream of recorded music.
Not everyone liked the new electronic music or understood it, of course; but we composers jumped into it like madmen, realizing that for the first time, we could finally record some of our music, and actually hear it, without having to hire live musicians, and spend studio money to do it! I had been recording music for 15 years by 1984, and all of it had to be written out and rehearsed. So this new technology was, to us, the gnat’s nuts!
I had started my own small recording studio back in ’75, with a Teac 4-track recorder and one cheap mic So when the computer world and the synth world finally got on the same page, I was ready. When I got my Prophet 5 plugged into the Mac and saw that everything was working and talking to each other, I quickly filled up all 4 tracks with the first music that came into my head. Probably took less then ten minutes, and when it was done, I sat back and listened to it, and came to the realization that now I could hear and play my myriad musical thoughts… almost instantly!
Here’s one of my first attempts, with the new electronic toys, done in ’87. Named Little Bopper. It was for my son, Dillon, who was one at the time. It was an experiment to see how real I could make the horn sounds sound. There were some successes and failures, of course. Most of the trumpet sounds were of the cheese variety, but trombones, french horns, flutes and clarinets were already fairly real-sounding. I did Little Bopper in two evenings after work, and was delighted with the outcome.
Here is my studio at the time, with Little Bopper his bad self.
It was a memorable time for me, as I’m sure it was for most composers. In the years following. We would all spend a bunch of money, buying new gear, keeping up with the Joneses and chasing the almost daily new face of the music technology. Because once MIDI opened the door to conversation between computer and synth, Katy couldn’t bar it.
One amazing new element was the advent of the drum machine. Roger Lynn put out the first really good one, the Lynn Drummer. It used real drum sounds, recorded well with its sounds digitized into a small box with buttons on the surface. It could be accessed from the keyboard, and it was hilariously easy to program. We all went to it like a duck to water. Here’s an example of one of my first attempts with the new machine, Jazzophrenic, which I did as an experiment to see how real it could get my new horns samples to sound. Notice the trumpet and piano sounds still weren’t even close yet, but the electric piano and trombone sounds were pretty decent.
Another new element made a significant impact on our constant attempts to try to make electronic, or computerized music, sound more real. It was an outboard box called a sampler, which first hit the market in 1986. The most popular one back then was the Emu-Emax. With a sampler, one could actually record a live instrument into the box, then digitize the real sound and access that real sound with the keyboard. Holy Hannah! It was wonderful! There were floppy disks that came with them, with sounds of live instruments that others had recorded, so if our recorded attempts didn’t sound so good, we could use theirs!
This is the last studio I had in Atlanta. I closed it down Spring of ’05.
Here’s a piece I recorded in this studio in the picture. It was mostly MiDI instruments with a few sampled sounds. I think you can tell that the basic instruments were now sounding more real all the time. She’s Mysterious.
I had 13 different studios in the course of my career, and each new studio brought with it new equipment, more sophisticated technology, both in software and in the synths. One of the biggies was, I think, back in 1990, when a software company, Digital Performer, released a new version of their music software that could record digital audio into the computer, called a DAW, digital audio workstation. It was the first of many, and once again changed the face of music recording on a huge scale.
One of my favorite new instrument samples was the acoustic guitar. Now I could do songs much more suited to guitar than keyboards, with a new-found freedom to pursue different, sometimes better avenues. And around ’98 the woodwind and string sounds began sounding very real, the new samples being well-recorded and placed in digital libraries that were easy, if somewhat expensive, to access.
Over time and almost countless recordings, I found that I was a prolific composer, if not a great one. I now have dozens of digital files of songs I did in my own studio, late at night sometimes, simply chasing an idea, or trying out a new sound I had either just bought, or sampled myself.
Here’s an example of one of my own sampled sounds, a Peruvian wood flute, which I brought back from Peru in ’94 and played into the sampler, then used in a song, entitled “Brazilian Sunset.”
My last purchase of a powerful software came in 2002, when I bought and installed a version of Digital Performer (DP) which included 88 tracks of recorded digitized instruments… that is, if one’s computer were powerful enough to digest that much info input. At the same time many companies released tons of digital files of real sampled instruments… bases, violins, horns, percussion, all orchestral instruments that now made it possible to duplicate the sound of a complete orchestra within the computer!
I need you to understand that I loved, and still love music so much! For over ten years I might be working on a jingle or an orchestration for a client’s recording session, yet I would almost always take an hour or so after, to work on a private composition… perhaps just a little jazz tune like I mentioned earlier, or a piece for some new sampled instrument sounds I was messing with, to see how ‘real’ I could make them sound. And even then, when I finally went home at night, the melodies and ideas for tomorrow danced in my goofy head.
Because, you see, a lot of the jingles we did were so basic, so simple, that I wanted to clear my mind of their mundanity at the end of the day, in hopes that the simple jingles, the caboose, the money end of the “creative train,” wouldn’t pull down whatever creative depth I might have left. For me, it was a little like a horse that had been ridden by flatlanders all day, then finally tuned loose to run, kick and buck the way it had wanted to be doing all day.
Here’s a :30 piece I did for a museum tv spot. The pictures took us through different rooms, with the music enterpreting what we were seeing. You see why it was so much fun to do a real piece of music after work!
With a 24-track console, and a whole raft of new soft instruments, my last 4-5 years of recording were a total pleasure, even more so than in past years. For now my attempts had no “cheese factor” left in them. If performed into the computer properly, it was nearly impossible to tell a computer orchestra from a real one. And that had been our dream all along.
Here’s a piece I did for a short film Noir, The Devil To Pay in 2004. This is the credits music, revisiting the movie’s main theme, and the only live instrument on it is the alto sax, played by the inimitable Skip Lane.
I’m sure that the MIDI technology has continued to advance since then, but it no longer mattered to me… I had what I needed, and could now stop chasing it. A thing called a “loop” had come along, making it painfully easy for the non-musician to simply pick a loop of sound and performance and slap it onto a computer track, then add whatever to it. It is basically making your own song from someone else’s idea… an idea that you pay for. I hate them, but these days I hear them all the time, on tv and in many new radio songs. (Which I also can’t stand.)
Also, chatGPT, the AI giant, says it does original music for us, and it does… but man does it stink. I say that, but then in comparison to much pop music on the radio and internet today, maybe it compares better than I think it does. I tried it, and hated the result, as it was, well, stupid. But I’m an old guy now, and I instantly forgive myself for my failures, prejudices and general weaknesses. And why not? What an electric life I had!
Steve Hulse
That museum piece is epic – So was the CD on the project 🙂