Summer, 1977: back home from my first year of college, recording the sound of traffic pass by our house while playing drones on my family's Hammond organ (a dual keyboard with pedals home model, not a B3 or anything) and antique pump organ.
A little while later I bought an Arp Axxe used from a friend. I flipped on its self-triggering mode and recorded one channel of me randomly fiddling with sliders and switches, running the Axxe through a guitar distortion pedal and wah-wah. Playing that channel on one tape machine into the left channel of another deck, I record another track of the same stuff to the right channel without listening to what had been done before.
My folks were away on vacation so I'd invite friends over, light up a spliff, slap some headphones on them and play the tape back without telling them what it was . . . just to see how long they could stand it. None of them could make it longer than 5 minutes. They'd rip the headphones off, totally freaked by the two channels of chaos and nearly complete randomness that had been blaring into their young altered minds, demanding to know just what the f*&k they had been subjected to.
By then I was rolling on the floor laughing. In was insane nonsense, but at times it actually sounded good. That's how I learned what all the controls on a synth were about. I had no information that gave me a clue how things were supposed to work, I just fiddled with all the knobs until I figured out what was doing what.
It wasn't until a lot later that I realized all this really had been music. I never claimed to be a musician until the late '80s. Before that, I simply told people I just like "to make strange noises on electronic instruments."
Many people would probably say that still holds true.
When did you first realise that you could create music?
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- KVRAF
- 6496 posts since 26 Nov, 2004 from Frederick, MD
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- KVRian
- 1411 posts since 25 Sep, 2003 from The Dirty South, USA
I realise that I could make music when the prophecies of Kraftwerk were finally coming to life.
Like I said before, if I want to listen to new music, I can use this technology and make it myself.
Like I said before, if I want to listen to new music, I can use this technology and make it myself.
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- KVRian
- 868 posts since 7 May, 2002 from Sydney, Australia
1963, my mother doing the ironing (presumably with beehive hair), i'm in the baby bassinet .. she's singing along with Tom Jones on the radio "Pussycat, pussycat i love you .." ... my first words, sung not spoken : 'yes I do' .
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- KVRist
- 454 posts since 2 May, 2004 from somewhere behind my eyes
When did you first realise that you could create music?
The first time i had a bath after eating baked beans.
The first time i had a bath after eating baked beans.
The above "words" are the ramblings of a depraved megalomaniac.Any similarity to normal communication is a hallucination on the part of the reader.Replying to this post will result in your family and posessions becoming the property of funkynuts.
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- KVRAF
- 9064 posts since 1 Aug, 2003
Beautiful story.Pantsdown666 wrote:1963, my mother doing the ironing (presumably with beehive hair), i'm in the baby bassinet .. she's singing along with Tom Jones on the radio "Pussycat, pussycat i love you .." ... my first words, sung not spoken : 'yes I do' .