Back in my yout i was playing a lot of bad metal but i was moastly wishing i could play 70's italian filmscore poliziotteschi soundtrack music.

I wasn't really skilled enough on any instrument to pull it off though, nor did i know anyone who could or would remotely even want to.

These facts however did not stop me from attempting it at some point in about 1997 or so.

I recoarded this then:



Seven short songs that *almost* did what i wanted them to, despite my utter inability to play or actually kind of comprehend the style of music i was aiming for.

It is only like thirteen minutes total, if so inclined, you should just go here and "play all" to listen to them in order, as they are actually arranged as in filmstyle to tell a story:

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default ... tent=music

There is one in particular that i thought showed promise, but altogether i find the group of them to be amusing. I wish i could muster up the kind of motivation i had back then to reach for something so over-my-head, even knowing that i would not be able to pull it off. I suppose that is a state of mind that i do aim to and hope to, re-acquire.

Oh and actual recoarding setup is unsurprisingly, for me, and for the time, properly ghetto.

Tascam 414 tape fourtrack. Not more than two drum microphones. And a Yamaha GeneralMIDI-style keyboard that my mom had, for pretty much everything that isn't a guitar. The keyboard was just run through some random pedals i had, and then straight into the fourtrack. The guitars are pretty much all through a tiny Peavey bandit solid state amp that i was borrowing from a friend. Probably my old Charvette for a guitar. I didn't own a real bass back then.

The low end on the thing is kind of OTT. A combination of the fact that the keyboard direct had a lot of low end available, and the tape accentuated it to boot. Also, back then when i ripped it to my computer, i probably ran it through Waves MaxxBass or something, as i had that sort of stuff in Soundforge back then, and was too dumb to realize that it didn't necessarily make anything better, just boomier.

Ha! This is cool to hear/imagine the motions your brains were going through. How old were you when this was done? It's damn cool and quite odd.

Exit and Segueway are particularly cool.

I would have been about 20 i think? I would have been playing the drums and guitar for six or seven years at that point, the keyboards for about a week . Also, while i had been playing drums for 6-ish years, i had never even attempted to play them in this style.

Nowadays, i actually play a little more like this style, but back then, i could pretty much do a dozen variations of the beat from Helmet's Meantime, and well... just about nothing else. So this was WAY more than a stretch for me back then. You can hear the drums completely teetering on the verge of disaster throughout. That is also not helped by the fact that i recorded the drums all by themselves, and then tried to write the songs around the random beats.

[Which is actually another thing that i do a lot these days, but this here recording would have actually been the very first time i ever tried it out as a technique. It took me a long time to figure out some of the tricks to making that work better. Eventually moving over to digital recording actually wound up being a big part of figuring out those tricks. ]

Anyhow, at that point, there are a couple things that go into the way things sound through this.

1. For one, i completely DNGAF about anything, or how anything looked or sounded.
2. For two, when recoarding to cassette tape on only four tracks, there were no edits, no overdubs, no fixes whatsoever. This was of course, extra accentuated by #1 also.

Also, i like various things about all of them, except for maybe the intro, which kind of just needed to exist as a thing, and which seems to me now to just kind of be extra 'throwaway and repetitive' in execution.

My favorite is probably The Setup/The Getaway though. It is also, the most "composition-like" of all of them. But yarr, i really enjoyed that dissonant keyboard blangblang sound from Exit(hence why i kept doing it overandoverandoverandoverandover ). And i really was happy with the nasty sixtiesfuzz sound that i got out of the Bandit.

I was actually so into the Banditfuzz that i put the thing into the back cover of the CD i made for myself of it:

I'm finally listening to this and the various other things you've all posted.

Garsh, I love how these tapey things sound.

It sounds very much like the Chris D drums I know, even if it's forever ago. The rest though is indeed a bit immature. But it's pretty cool for what it is.

I'm finally getting around to being able to listen to this and...



Geoff is right.

A few tracks in, and- I would listen to this intentionally. I like the mood. It works, for me, as a general listening thing. The keyboardbass actually doesn't sound bad. The aforementioned busy Chrisdrumming keeps things moving along nicely. If you actually did decide to devlop this stuff I think it would turn out quite nicely. The very active drums offset the chill-ness of the rest. It's a cool contrast.

Interestingly, for the drums, i would probably say that this recording is right about where i "turned the corner" from how i used to play, to how i play now, so it is not surprising to me that it sounds more or less like how i play now. I definitely didn't play as swingy or use the snare in the same way or as much, before this. And that one fill near the end of the Setup/Getaway sounds pretty much like i recorded it yesterday or something. That is exactly how i work around fills now.

My attempt to try to do this without actually learning how to play the drums correctly in this style(like rudiments and jazz drums and all of the other stuff i should have learned first) and in my view at the time of what i was trying to do, almost being able to do it(even though it sounds like a right clusterfuck to me nowadays) both combined to pretty much be what got me focusing much more deliberately on playing the way i do now. Like "Holy shit, that almost worked. I wonder if i could figure it out a little better keep going with it?"

I actually feel pretty fortunate to have recorded, those moments of "figuring something new out". Which is something that happens all of the time with instruments, but usually you don't get to record it. And this was kind of the genesis of a big change in drumstyle for me, and i did wind up recording it. So as sketchy as it sounds to me now, i do go back somewhat often to listen to it, as a historical document sort of thing.