About My Music

The Synthesizers

I've been tinkering with musical instruments for as long as I can remember, and I've been creating electronic music (some only barely classifiable as such) since my first Commodore 64. During my Amiga days, I made a few mods (an old 4-sample music format) for a Shareware game called MegaBall and a music player called EdPlayer, both of which were programmed by my brother. With the profits from MegaBall, I bought a good music Workstation, the legendary Kurzweil K2000 (brand new in those days, I still have the V1.0 ROM set installed) which I used to write some tracks for an Amiga CD32-based version of MegaBall that never saw the light of day.

My favorite music program from the Amiga days, OctaMED, has been ported to Windows, and all the old sound hardware limitations of the Amiga (yes, advanced in its time, but lacking by today's standards) were blown away. I still have the K2000, and shortly after I got my hands on OctaMED for Windows, I added a used Clavia Nord Lead to my setup. Just recently, I also bought a wonderful synthesizer called the SidStation, which is based around the music chip from the Commodore 64.

You've probably heard about the MP3 audio format. This format was originally developed to compress audio in MPEG movie files, but is ideal for highly compressed near-CD-quality audio on its own. This format is wonderful for musicians like myself who want their music heard, but don't want to go chasing a binding recording contract.

Care to be traumatized by my brief forray into General MIDI? Click here, if you dare.