Music - Background

Way back in the day – while I was in high school, in fact, I noticed that I had an increasingly-huge mound of extremely bad poetry accumulating in my closet. Yeah, those were the heady days of Adolescence, where the world might have been my oyster- but no pearls were to be had. Beset upon by the ongoing angst of my formative years, coupled with the survival skills necessary to survive the Brady Bunch Experiment, I wrote and wrote… playing with words to see how many different ways I could put them together.

I also had an idea, based on the fact that I was listening to a-capella 50’s music back then (a phase I went through). If I could find a way to record onto one tape recorder, then play that back into another tape recorder while adding a new part, then I could just keep up that process until I had a whole song. Further, if I could separately record the left and right parts at different times… I could take all that bad poetry and make bad songs out of it.

So, I guess I invented the multi-track tape recorder as well as sound-on-sound recording. Never mind that Les Paul had beaten me to it by about 45 years… hey, at least my brain was working!

Well, I was limited by the technology available to me at the time – that is, all of my “parts” were aurally recorded into the cheesy little condenser mics in cheesy little mono cassette recorders with cheesy little 4" speakers. Also, I couldn’t play any instrument – I had a few little oscillator circuits I built in electronics class, but they weren’t equal-tempered, so they were pretty much unusable for the project: Theremin-like, but I wasn't into Electronica yet.

Trying desperately to hold a consistent pitch on the little monophonic multi-oscillator, our hero furrows his young little brow in concentration. Perhaps, with diligence and practice, he may yet someday achieve the prowess of his Mentors, Brian Eno and David Bowie.

That cable leaving my shirt right over my heart was connected to a primitive and jury-rigged sendor pad, which drove a little astable multivibrator circuit that approximated (back in the day, you remember!) a cymbal. Thus, slapping my chest would trigger the emphasis note.

Big fun, but un-workable.

Right away, I realized that the compression of the ALC systems in the recorders was really hindering what little signal/noise ratio I could otherwise manage… although I obviously didn’t know how to articulate that fact back then – all I knew is that the results sounded like mush, and I didn’t have the knowledge or financing to specify better gear or a better method.

I dabbled around with this technology for awhile, and gave up. Somehow, I never made the conceptual leap to line mixing. That’d take a few more years, and critical input from a guy who was destined to become my best friend, Mike Masquith. More on Mike in a bit.

Preparatory to tossing his headphones on the floor in disgust, our Mister Man reflects on the Art of the Possible.

Without the Advent of the Internet, recall that seeking out new technologies was far more difficult a task than it is today. Before researching a discipline, one had to first determine whether that discipline existed, and if so, what it was called. Only then would a trip to the Library serve a useful purpose.

What a dark and archaic age it was!!

During my Junior year in High School, a classmate invited me to join his garage band, to play bass. I scrabbled to get $40 together, and plunked it down for a used Memphis bass in a pawnshop. Figuring that my older brother, Matt, had taught himself to play guitar (and well, too – Matt is a much better guitarist than I am), “well”, I reasoned, “it only has four strings compared to Matt’s 6.”

Yeah, right. I showed up, only to learn that not only was I gonna be the bassist, I got to be the vocalist, too! Not only that, we got to be a cover band, playing limp versions of Hendrix and Knopfler tunes. Somehow I muddled through for a month or so, but finally had to admit that I wasn’t near good enough on a bass for that gig. Still, it was a good excuse for all of us to drink beer and swagger around as if we were talented or something…

I put the musicianship on hold for a couple years, focusing on DJ’ing, instead, and contenting myself with being a hanger-on of my brother Matt’s band, “The Resistors”.

Here's me, at about the same time. While Matt honed his musical chops, I worked on my photographic technique. Both of these photos were technical studies in chiara-scura lighting methods. Matt's was a simple overhead light, with a zone-controlled background (tonal ranges in the shadows of his face weren't where I wanted them, but I liked his expression in this shot, so I keep it. Mine was a study in multiple-flash technique, and trying to get the specular highlights into a workable range.

Without meaning to sound overly mushy about this, I owe a lot of who I am today to a buddy of mine, Mike Masquith. His relationship as a friend has had a very profound effect on my life in several important areas (watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” and you’ll get a sense of how little things can affect the Big Picture). My development as a musician has been very dramatically assisted by Mike – and here’s a small sample as to “how”:

Mike and I met at a new wave club, where the Resistors were playing. Unknown to me, the bassist in my bro’s band was a friend of Mike’s, so he had come to see the band as well. By some quirk of fate / geekiness, Mike and I ended up standing behind the mixing board, wondering what it did and how it worked, and why it had so many damn knobs. We started discussing the technology, which naturally lead to music in general, our desire to start a band, the requisite demonstrations of each other’s car stereos, etc…

Getting together a week later, Mike demonstrated how to do the “bouncing” from tape deck to tape deck using a line mixer, and I was off. First problem was that I didn’t have a line mixer, so I built one. That was easy enough. The second problem is that I still had the reams of poetry, but it was still bad. The third problem was that I didn’t play an instrument! I had an old Memphis bass guitar, and a pair of drumstick to whap at stuff, but that was about it.

Mike loaned me a cheap guitar, and I pretty much taught myself to play. Gradually, my skills and equipment began to improve. My Dad stepped in, one afternoon, when he saw me sitting in my grisly little room with blood coming out of my fingertips, and gave me $300 to go buy a real guitar. (That was a Vantage VS-695, which today remains my favorite axe out of my entire collection.)

Throughout the intervening years, Mike and I have collaborated on a tremendous number of projects, been in bands together, sorted out new technologies, hammered out software and cabling issues, fought about mixes, geezed, carried on the Good Fight, listened to and agreed/disagreed as to what was “good music”, embarrassed ourselves, drank an ocean of beer, and generally had a good time… the telling of which would consume a vast amount of Web space.

In the meantime, I concentrated on live performance. My brother, Matt, and I had been 2/3 of a 3-piece group way back in elementary school - "The Goldbricks", on account of our activities got us excused from a lot of classwork! The group was pretty well-known across PG County, and we performed gigs a-plenty.

As Matt and I grew, that urge to perform never really went away. Out in Accokeek, MD, where we lived, there was a Knights of Columbus hall a few miles away, where this cool guy set up a 4-track recorder on Friday nights, and hosted an open stage. Cafe Florian. Matt played a lot there a lot, working mostly on his own material and developing his writing style. I occasionally had the chance to join him, doing harmony parts, or together with him doing cover tunes.

<<Goofin' with Matt on a hot summer day at Dyson Road after rehearsing and shot-gunning a couple Colt-45's (is it an oxymoron to "shotgun" a Colt 45?!).

>>When all else fails, nothing beats the time-honored Tradition of "Sittin' on Cars"! Here, me and my buddy Paul hang out, prior to commencing the long drive to a gig far, far away.

I know you’re anxious to start downloading, but there are a few nuts and bolts pertaining to the legality of you downloading my stuff, and all that other mish-mosh that goes with the expectation of being financially-rewarded for artistic endeavor (“bullshit!” I say, but we have to play the game.)

Bear with me, and click on the "Free MP3's" button below to get a little closer to the "meat".