The story of how I got into music
January 6th, 2011 by louis linggYo Dudes!
Nobody’s asked me to do this but I thought I’d embark on a mammouth series of blogs explaining the entire story of my life in music. (14 years of stuff!)
There’s nothing really extroadinary in my story compared to a million other crazy bands and musician’s stories but there’s a load of really interesting stuff to say anyway. You’ll see!
Well, I was 18 years old at university, I had £150 left over after paying bills and stuff. Amazing! So I bought myself a Vester telecaster copy and a Peavy “Rage” amp.
I struggled a little with chords and scales. “I’ll never be able to play anything” I said. “I’m giving up.”
“Fuck all that shit” said my mate Paul “this is a barchord. You move it up and down the neck and you can play any rock song in the world!”
After a month of trying the powerchord (two strings – the bar chrord was, and still is, too difficult), I finally got it and I’ve not looked back since! In fact, I haven’t even progressed at all since!
Remember folks creativity doesn’t necessarily come with technical musicianship. Songwriting comes from an entirely different part of the brain from the bit that helps you learn scales and that stuff.
I still have that Vester guitar (a german company that’s been bankrupt for decades).
Shit! I’ve got to start work. My students are arriving.
Next blog: How I formed my first group, Dummycrusher. Thing’s start getting crazy!
Picture the scene. It’s the 90s. Three 18 year old friends at university in adjacent rooms. I was playing guitar in my room and my two friends Paul and Paul (2 Pauls!) were playing respectively, Bass, and the other Paul was mixing happy hardcore (a kind of english techno popular in the 90s) on his decks.
We all opened our doors and stepped into the hall. “Holy shit! Let’s jam together” “good idea!”. So we turned up our respective instruments and played together in the corridor. What a glorious noise!
It didn’t worked out though. We couldn’t decifer how to play along with the happy hardcore. What key was it in? What chord changes were happening? How could we control the song structures? All these questions were beyond our grasp at the time!
Me and Paul (the bassist) continued to work together. We realised that we could use his PC to make noise! (It was the start of soft synths and beatboxes – I think the synth was called VAZ or Rubberduck or something like that). Paul had a 4-track tape machine so we put 1 track of computer drums and synths, 1 track of bass, 1 track of guitar and 1 track of vocals. 4 tracks! Well I listened back to this demo (I remember doing 2 songs) when I took magic mushrooms for the first time and it sounded really good. Objectively though, it was interesting and eye opening but it wasn’t going to win us any friends!
Back to the drawing board!
Paul got his hands on Cool edit pro (an old freeware sequencer you could get online at the beginning of the internet) Infinate tracks! You can import and treat samples! This stuff was mind blowing back in those days. (Shit! I used Cool edit pro right up to 2004!) A new musical world was opening up before us…
Next time: How we made an album with a computer (wow!)
