I have been into music for a long time. I have been playing drums since I was 3 years old. You can go to my Drumset page and see a picture of my drumset, along with a complete description of it. Now, I do most of my songwriting with a few friends, William Farr & Eric Pryce. We have trouble getting together because of school & work schedules, but we get together whenever we can. So far, most of our work has been done on my computer. We do a mixture of sequencing and digital audio recording. We are currently using CakeWalk Pro Audio 5.0 for this. It's a great program: very versatile, powerful, and easy to use. Below is a list of the equipment we own and use to record.
Zeos Pantera - Pentium 60 (120 Overdrive) w/ 24 MB RAM, 512 KB L2 Cache, & 5.1 GB Hard Drive sapce.
- This is the computer we do most of our work on. Zeos (now Micron Electronics) computers are very well designed and even outperform many Pentium 100 - 133 computers, so its nice and fast. And in digital audio recording, that's what it's all about.
Creative Labs - SoundBlaster AWE 32
- This soundcard has wavetable synthesis, so it has some pretty realistic sounds, especially compared to most soundcards. I don't think any normal soundcard stacks up to this one.
Mackie CR-1604 Mixer
- We finally got a good quality 16-channel mixer.
Roland AX-1
- Now this is the ultimate MIDI controller, an Ax keyboard. This thing can do everything. Patch select, effects control, touch sensitive pitch-bend pad (really cool), modulation, you name it! And all this wrapped up in an attractive Red color. It's William's pride & joy!
Yamaha - TG 33
- This sound module has some cool sounds. Neat effects too.
Yamaha - DX 27
- This is a keyboard I've had for a long time. The sounds in it really aren't worth jack, but it works as a controller board (although it is slowly breaking).
- This is our other controller keyboard. It doesn't have the Pitch Bend and Modulation like the DX 27, but at least it's staying in 1 piece.
- There is way too much to be said about my drumset here, so you can find out all about it on my Drumset page.
- I can't say much about this (I don't know that much about it) except that Eric uses it to throw out some cool solos. He's a great sax player.
- Although it's not the greatest, its a guitar.
- Like I said, tons of other stuff. Too much to mention here.
We're also trying to get some better equipment. In particular, were considering the Digidesign AudioMedia III PCI for PC, a huge hard drive and tape backup, either the Roland JV-1080 or the Ensoniq MR-Rack, and a number of other things. We're also planning to build a recording isolation booth for singing & stuff like that.
So who uses all of this stuff? Well, for the most part, we all do. In particular, here's what each of us play:
Drums
Keyboards
Guitar
I'm also the primary computer operator (A.K.A. GOD)
Keyboards
Vocals
As you can see, we all do quite a variety of things. In practice, we all do everything. I'll tell Eric were to throw a word or 2, Will says "play a hi hat here", etc. so we all work with each other, which is what writing music is all about.
We have completed a variety of songs, and we have some others we have been working on for quite a while (our Christmas song has been going on for 2 years. Damn, we just missed another X-mas. Oh well, maybe next year).
Here is a midi version of one of our songs. The quality may vary, depending on your sound card. Dawn was written for the Creative Labs AWE32 sound card, and will probably sound best using it. I doubt it will sound any good with any FM synthesis (non-wavetable) sound card. If you visit The Dawn Page, you can download an MP3 version of Dawn, with lyrics and all. You can also read the lyric transcript of Dawn. You can also download an MP3 version of Saturday Night from The Saturday Night Page.
Dawn
copyright © 1996