Chris Clawson
New Member
I am Chris, in Massachusetts USA. I am an aging historian and a longtime student of vintage media and how technology may help conserve it. This is at least my third venture into what was once called “electronic music”. I was fascinated by the Moog and ARP synthesizers and built a number of circuits in an attempt to design my own synthesizer. I was soon horrified to learn that you needed to actually PERFORM the synth and that no sort of player piano roll or sequence control tape existed. (1970)
In 1979, I built my first computer with Z-80 microprocessor, a bit of memory and toggle switches to program it. Around 1985, I bought my first 'store bought' computer. It was a box of parts from Hong Kong, included no meaningful documentation. I managed to get it together and run. It had a pair of 128k 7-inch floppy drives. One was for DOS the other was for the bootable program. Now I had something useful! MIDI had arrived and I bought a MIDI card and connected it to my keyboard synthesizer. I later added a 10 MB hard drive. (Wow) this was the first real practical thing I could do with a home PC! I loaded an early version of Cakewalk and began grabbing sheet music out of Flea Markets and attics.
Life went on and please pray for me with this modern day venture into home music production! I have been copying scores into Musescore (and now Sibelius) and producing 'performances' from the Silent movie screen and Theater orchestras from the late 1800s. My old 78 record collection goes back to 1892 and my most 'modern' records are from around 1930. It is exciting to be able to hear modern sounding recordings of music I have only heard on a 110 year old record. There are some great titles which never been recorded in modern times.
I can read and interpret most scores and transcribe them into Sibelius (even being able to correct printing errors in the score). My ear is also good enough to debug sour notes and other bugs in my transcription. Still, a 60 page orchestra score takes at least a week to transcribe, before I even get near the mixing and audio. I am pleased at the technology and confounded by all the virtual cables DAWs, Synths, libraries and scoring tools. Getting help and understanding of this is a monster. My particular setup may be unique to anyone else, and the debug of it mainly depends on understanding what I am doing and the underlying concepts.
I have been beating my brain on this for about 8 months and are now to a point where I can how to ask intelligent questions and not embarrass myself. I just hope I will still live long enough to do something good with it. I have already got a life saving suggestion on how to double stop play my NI Cremona Quartet and am pleased to be near a group which at least understands what I am talking about. My other 'Geezer' friends just walk away or stare at me, like I had two heads, when I talk about this. Please forgive the rant. Most of you probably already know most of this. See you around!
Chris
Montague Historical Society
montaguearchive.org
In 1979, I built my first computer with Z-80 microprocessor, a bit of memory and toggle switches to program it. Around 1985, I bought my first 'store bought' computer. It was a box of parts from Hong Kong, included no meaningful documentation. I managed to get it together and run. It had a pair of 128k 7-inch floppy drives. One was for DOS the other was for the bootable program. Now I had something useful! MIDI had arrived and I bought a MIDI card and connected it to my keyboard synthesizer. I later added a 10 MB hard drive. (Wow) this was the first real practical thing I could do with a home PC! I loaded an early version of Cakewalk and began grabbing sheet music out of Flea Markets and attics.
Life went on and please pray for me with this modern day venture into home music production! I have been copying scores into Musescore (and now Sibelius) and producing 'performances' from the Silent movie screen and Theater orchestras from the late 1800s. My old 78 record collection goes back to 1892 and my most 'modern' records are from around 1930. It is exciting to be able to hear modern sounding recordings of music I have only heard on a 110 year old record. There are some great titles which never been recorded in modern times.
I can read and interpret most scores and transcribe them into Sibelius (even being able to correct printing errors in the score). My ear is also good enough to debug sour notes and other bugs in my transcription. Still, a 60 page orchestra score takes at least a week to transcribe, before I even get near the mixing and audio. I am pleased at the technology and confounded by all the virtual cables DAWs, Synths, libraries and scoring tools. Getting help and understanding of this is a monster. My particular setup may be unique to anyone else, and the debug of it mainly depends on understanding what I am doing and the underlying concepts.
I have been beating my brain on this for about 8 months and are now to a point where I can how to ask intelligent questions and not embarrass myself. I just hope I will still live long enough to do something good with it. I have already got a life saving suggestion on how to double stop play my NI Cremona Quartet and am pleased to be near a group which at least understands what I am talking about. My other 'Geezer' friends just walk away or stare at me, like I had two heads, when I talk about this. Please forgive the rant. Most of you probably already know most of this. See you around!
Chris
Montague Historical Society
montaguearchive.org
