The Electric Chair

A song 23 years in the making.
(A story of the first two songs I ever wrote, with audio evidence)

When I was around 13 my parents bought me an electric (musical) keyboard. It didn’t do much, but it had some pre-set drum beats that allowed me to noodle around and make some actual music. I didn’t know how to play piano at all, but I was knowledgeable about music since I had been playing Clarinet for year.

It didn’t take long for me to actually create a song… well, the beginnings of a song. The next few years as I learned more about music the song evolved… I even recorded it onto a tape (which has long since disappeared).

A few years later while house sitting for my girlfriend’s family, I borrowed her keyboard which was quite a bit better than my own. Her keyboard allowed me to record multiple tracks onto the keyboard itself. A few days of house-sitting and the song was complete, but stuck on her keyboard.

Fast forward some years later. Around the time my college career was ending I discovered something called “Tracking”. A pretty popular geek musical past time, tracking is like the programming version of creating music. You don’t use a musical instrument, instead you use an application that allows you to create “tracks” where you fill in data in numbered slots. That data translates to the starting and stopping of instruments, volumes, panning, effects… etc. The sound quality was awful, as all the samples it used were 8-bit at the time (meaning they were full of hiss and muffled almost static sounds). It was a popular thing though, so I decided to give a try.

My first attempt was to convert that old song. So I borrowed the keyboard (I was happy that she kept the recorded song for so many years), and set to converting the song, one note at a time. I never had a name for the song, though I remember naming it quite a while after the conversion when I was 23, ten years after I began the song when I was 13, so I not so cleverly named it 23/13.

I’ve played the song for my wife and kids (the kids really like it)… and over the years many fellow geeks on IRC heard it as well. As the years went on, I began to be annoyed and a bit embarrassed at how low the sound quality was. So recently I decided to revisit the song and update it. I grabbed a new tracker, and armed myself with fresh 16bit samples. Interestingly enough this new take is 13 years from my last work on it (23 years after I began, making the 23/13 name even more appropriate).

So here I present to you, the first song I ever wrote. Yes, it’s a bit cheezy (what do you expect from a 13 year old), and may not be your cup of tea at all… but I’m still proud of it. It’s not Jazz/Swing, it’s not blues, and it’s not “funk” really, which are what most people would probably expect from me since those are what I’m generally listening to the most.

23/13

(Click here to download the mp3)

The next song…

During the same era of my life, I create a few more “Tracks” (we called them MOD’s as they were named after the Amiga Modular Tracker). The second one I created completely from scratch just experimenting with the tracker to see what would come out of my head. I’d kind of randomly put some notes down, listen to it, and then adjust it until I had something I liked. I haven’t a clue why, but I named it “XL-101″. After I finished revamping the first song this last weekend, I gave XL-101 the same treatment. It also is cheezy. The updated version is decidedly more electronic sounding than the first, which surprises me… but music creation is organic that way to me.

At any rate, here’s the second song I wrote…

XL-101

(Click here to download the mp3)

I’ve only recorded a total of 8 songs I have written my entire life. I’m not a gifted song-writer, but I have created a few uncomplicated songs. I’m not sure why I decided to share… I guess mostly because any song deserves to be listened to, even if it is by just a few people.