Some people probably have no idea that I make music. This usually stems from the absurd ideas that some people have that everyone is one dimensional. I guess were all guilty of this to some degree, we meet people, hear about them, or read about them in books, and we only know one or two sides of that person. There technical skill set, there ability to solve a problem, That they were an excellent military leader, or a "bad" president. Whatever. We tend to see people in a very small subset of what they really are or really can be.

Anyway, sometime last year, just before I got married, I received a really cool wedding present. A DMan 2044 Sound Card with the 8 port IO box. After a little headache getting everything working I began experimenting and did some recording with my guitar.

Now don't expect studio quality CD's to pop up here, but in my own way I am just sharing a little piece of my humanity with the rest of the world. I mean that's what the Internet is all about. Right?

Ok, without further ado, here are the first few tracks I am publishing to the world. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did making them. By the way, this is also the order in which they were made. So I knew a tad more about recording as time went on. (Pennies sounds a little sloppy, while Six & 1/2 sounds a little cleaner.)

9/26/00   Track 1: 0:44 - "Pennies" 859 KB
This was my first thing I ever recorded. It's as off the cuff as it comes. I hit record and 45 seconds later this is what I had. I then added in some percussion to it to test out how the software worked. To enjoy it, give it lots of volume and decent bass.

9/27/00   Track 2: 6:32 - "Six And a Half" 7.47 MB
I had downed several drinks, put down a nice drum line to jam with and 6 minutes and thirty seconds later this was done. (Thus the title) It is entirely one take, one guitar in real-time improvisation record mode.

10/19/00   Track 3: 11:35 - "FunWifWah" 13.2 MB
This was fun to make. I had just purchased a wah pedal and this was made during my first day with it. Essentially this is 3 separate recordings done over an evenings time, each one having some of the same theme involved. It grew to become a massive 11 minute beast as I concatenated them.

10/24/00   Track 4: 3:51 - "Tres Voces del Amante" 4.38 MB
Roughly translated from Spanish, "Three Voices from the Lover" this is a love song. I laid down a single track from super clean acoustic. Then went back and triple tracked two additional lines over it. At almost any time you can pick out 3 separate guitar lines simultaneously (roughly) following the same progression. There are allot of time changes to this piece and some oddball rhythms. If anyone else out there feels like playing it there going to have to be able to count like Dracula ...

10/19/00   Track 5: 4:23 - "Ghostwind" 5.03 MB
Two guitars interweaving is one of the most beautiful sounds to me. What I did on this track is lay down the "cleaner" line completely improvisational, then immediately change some amp settings, plug in a stereo split and record the second "reverbier" voicing as a separate track. This thing almost wrote itself, start to finish it was done in 9 minutes.

10/21/00   Video Feed: 0:15 - "PO/SM 3" 343 KB
Digital cams are cool. This is a 15 second clip of me playing I took for the hell of it. I don't think it's trendy enough for M-TV though...

Just for the curious, my setup is as follows.

Ovation Celebrity Deluxe CS 257 (Acou/Elec) & Sigma 6 String Acoustic
Into Ernie Ball Stereo Split Volume pedal
Into Peavey Renown 212 "Solo Series"
Into DMAN 2044 Breakout Box on channels 1/2 stereo split from preamp out 1/2
Into the DMAN 2044 sound card on a windows95 PC.
I used Acid 1.0 (build 51) for recording and editing.

If you have any feedback, and yes that does include the "You use too much reverb or your phrasing is too predictable", please feel free to send it to loopy@loopy.org