My Short-Lived Music Career (Part 2)

When I was 15, I sold my drum set to a nice guy who was slightly older (at most 17), and far more competent at the drums than I was. Listening to him play the set before he walked away with them was a little depressing, because he sounded like a real pro.

Part of the sale included him trading me for a MIDI keyboard in addition to his cash. You see, I had been experimenting with music composition in MOD / S3M / XM tracking applications, and I felt much more comfortable putting together entire songs rather than simply playing a single instrument.

During my experimentation with the tracking scene, I managed to get involved with a Toronto-based tracking group called VSL (Variety is the Spice of Life). None of my tracks (as far as I can remember) ever made it out in their releases, and I grew frustrated with the tracking process. It involved hours of painstaking searches for samples, and I spent more time on the tools than the creation aspect.

So, my transition to MIDI, in addition to a Sound Blaster AWE32 (which included wave table synthesis—an incredible inclusion for such a low-cost card at the time), was the real birth of my music production career. There was still some sample-digging involved, but I managed to learn a lot more about the musical aspect (teaching myself a small bit about scales, chords, etc.) and experimented with various combinations of drums, keyboards, guitars, string sections, etc.

My tendency was to create electronic / dance music, because that's what I was really into at the time. Because of this, the General Midi set of 128 instruments just wasn't up to the task. I started getting stuck again with digging for appropriate samples, and screwing with software to load my AWE32 up with custom sounds.

For my 16th birthday, I got a Roland XP-50 music workstation. It was big, heavy, expensive, and I loved it immensely. It had an on-board sequencer (which was great for experimenting), a dance music expansion card (with loads of great sounds), and on-board patch editing. You could create just about any custom sound with an excellent base of relevant samples.

At this point, the music really started to flow. I got a copy of Cubase shortly after, and was churning out fairly complete tracks on a biweekly basis. I had pushed a few other guys in the tracking group to also jump on the MIDI bandwagon (they were also using AWE32s at the time, and managed to do well with them), and we got together to make a demo CD. We sent that demo CD out to a few record companies in the area, just to see what the reaction would be.

A Toronto-area dance music label approached us and said they loved the demo. They thought the tracks were well-produced, and they'd love to have a chat with us. We spoke about our musical tastes, our influences, and how we each made the music ourselves.

Upon learning how basic our setups really were, they were very impressed with the end results. None of us could really sing, and our musical talent was centered mostly around instrumental house / trance / europop genres. If anything, we'd be best suited to simply providing help with remixes, or pitching song ideas that could be used by the label's other groups. In the next installment, I'll talk more about how our group grew apart, and how I continued to work with the label a little bit more.