I’ve been thinking about my first musical instruments lately.
In 1986, my mom bought my a Yamaha PSR-21. This baby had 16 totally awesome built in sounds like “Cosmic” and “Funksynth”. It had four waveforms for each sound and four variations of a amplifier envelope as well.
That makes 256 sounds!
256 sounds that all sound strikingly similar to a bad digital waveform. I do remember liking the trumpet sound.
It also had a (slightly) programmable drum sequencer. I remember tapping out the disco rhythm for my first song “Nuclear Toxic Sludge” in 1989 on this baby. I really have to put that song up here … along with the original versions of “Eating Light Bulbs” and “Moth on Bass”.
I had a copy of the “Pseudo Echo” cover of “Funky Town” I taped off the radio and I would JAM with that tune all day long. If you have no idea what I am talking about, click on the Youtube video above.
Maybe someday I’ll find the old PSR-21 … sample it … and turn it into a VSTi.
1st grade - 3rd grade = private piano lessons
4th grade - 5th grade = trumpet in the school band
6th grade - 8th grade = bad 80’s Yamaha synth at home
9th grade - 12th grade = timpani, electric guitar, electric bass in the school band
In the summer of 1989, My mom bought me my first electric guitar. It was a red Fender Strat that I still own today and has morphed over time into something called the “K1″. With that guitar, I discovered that I really enjoyed writing songs.
I had a horrible Radio Shack mixer that I would plug into my tape deck and try and record my songs. The first song I wrote was called “Nuclear Toxic Sludge”. I was 14.
Someday, I’ll post it on here. I have a recording of it that I made on my tape deck with me on guitar, my best friend Dewey on vocals and the above mentioned bad Yamaha keyboard on drums.
Somehow, I discovered that there were these crazy devices that allowed you to record and overdub tracks with normal cassette tapes. I convinced my mom to help me get the Yamaha MT100II.
I spent hundreds of hours of my life in my room, making songs on that thing. Sometimes I would borrow my friend (and musical mentor) Rafe’s crappy digital effects processor and make songs like “Space Whales”.
Later, after I graduated from high school and moved to Bellingham, I did quite a bit of recording with a Yamaha MT4X. My friend Nick had one and we used it to record our demos for the band “Shed”.
When Rafe got married, I gave him the MT100II as a gift. I think it needed a new power supply or something, but it was a huge thing for me to part with.
I’ll have to pick one up on ebay or something … just to have around …
I bought a MT4X a few years back, so I guess I need a MT100II now.
Once upon a time … in 1994 … I had this pink plastic Barbie phone. When you pressed its buttons, it would say things like:
“Let’s have a party!”
and
“I like the beach!”
I was in the incredibly strange band “Krusters Kronomid” at the time. I would plug the phone, and various other electronic devices, into my electric guitar - the K1. It was quite theatrical.
Rafe Wadleigh, the other guitarist/bass player in Krusters, picked up the ingenious whammy pedal and we used it quite a bit back then. Mike Seilo, our singer, called it the “red freaker”.
I ended up sending Barbie through the whammy pedal and “scratching” the sound effects and phrases that it spit out. I would trigger the sounds from its keypad while dropping the pitch with the whammy pedal.
Alas, the Barbie phone is nowhere to be found. Maybe she is in a trailer somewhere gorging herself on AA batteries and having triplets with a G.I. Joe talking backpack.
We did record it in the song “Moth on Bass” at Avast Studios in Seattle. It broke while setting up to do the take and Stuart Hallerman (the owner of Avast) threw it on the repair bench and fixed it for me.
We ended up recording the Barbie phone, bass and drums all at once, so the performance you hear isn’t an overdub … pre protools … 2″ 24 track … recorded and mixed by Kevin Suggs.
Talking Barbie Phone solo in the song “Moth on Bass”:
I bought my Lowrey organ for $15 at a Salvation Army in Bellingham in 1998. I had to take it apart to fix it. Some Christmas tinsel had fallen inside the keyboard and shorted it out, blowing a fuse. I raplaced the fuse and it worked fine.
I wrote several songs on it and loved the sound. Dave played it on the song “Colorblind” and I played it on the song “Quinsonnas” on “The View”.
When I moved back to Palouse in 1999, I had it in the ol’ chicken coop.
I recorded some various song ideas while I lived there on a late model Tascam four track. Here is one of them…
Untitled Lowrey Organ Song (1999)
It was big and heavy and I never wanted to move it again so I dismantled it and took out all the electronics. Inside the beast were two enormous plates covered in circuit boards on both sides. I still have them today.
Adam Cone and I lifted the wooden carcass of the Lowrey out of the coop and hurled it onto a raging bonfire.
When I moved to Moscow, I built a new case for it and put all the electronics back in. It ended up looking like a baby grand piano combined with a failed Gilligan’s Island escape attempt. I couldn’t get it to work right so I contacted a Lowrey service center and bought the repair manual. I got it running again and ended up recording one final song with it in my apartment in Moscow. It was called “Get Me Out of Here”.
I also used a Realistic Concertmate MG-1, Moog Source, and a Korg S3 drum machine. Recorded into a Fostex B-16 1/2 inch 16 track.
I recorded the vocals for “Get Me Out of Here” in a production room at the college radio station in Moscow Idaho. I was screaming the outro of the song “get me out of here … get me out of here” over and over. When I finished and left the little production studio room, I found a young girl DJ who looked as if she had seen a ghost.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
“What?” I said.
“Someone screaming “get me out of here … get me out of here!”
She had called campus security thinking that someone had been trapped in an elevator and was screaming to get free. She was seriously disturbed.
I then had to explain myself to her. I was so embarassed I don’t think I recorded another vocal track for several years.
It must have been 1995. I was playing in my first real band - “Krusters Kronomid”. I was in my one bedroom appartment in Bellingham getting ready for a show at the Viking Union, when Chris Walla showed up. He seemed concerned that maybe I had been in an accident.
At that time, I was having a lot of fun connecting electronic sounds into my guitar. Rafe Wadleigh (the guitarist/bassist) for Krusters had taken some headgear out of a construction helmet. I wired up a strange voice changing toy and connected it to the headgear.
Chris snapped this picture of me as I was testing it out.
Later that night, I tested it out on stage. The following is a worn-out tape recording of that test.
Rafe starts out playing a bass line causing the robo-headgear to go haywire. Then Jason McGerr (the drummer) comes in with the drums … and Mike Seilo (the singer) just looks on in disbelief.
The robot voice blares out - seemingly with a mind of its own. I was suppose to be in control of it. It had other ideas.
I yell “Wait … wait … quiet down … wait … it’s picking up too much stage noise.”
My favorite part is when Mike says “Let’s cut the side show and play a tune!”
WATCH YOUR EARS AND SPEAKERS! VERY HARSH SOUNDS!
It ended up sounding like a naughty robot throwing a tantrum. It broke the moment I took it off and I never bothered to fix it.
