Failed Muso on Bedroom Cassette Masters 7

Some while ago, I fulfilled a personal ambition of mine to release a single to an unsuspecting public. Surprisingly, people (not many) paid for it and downloaded it from iTunes or Amazon, and some even streamed it on Spotify. I still harbour an ambition to release something on a physical format, preferably vinyl, but I’m working on that.

Anyway, a couple of years ago I was made aware of a compilation album series called Bedroom Cassette Masters, and its curator, Simon Holland. Simon put out a call for bedroom musos to submit their tracks that they had made on their old porta-studios or similar, between 1980 and 1989 (or, at least deeply inspired by that era) to form neatly crafted albums of hopeful musicians making hopeful music in an age of wonder and discovery for grossly underfunded, indie wannabies. After five successful volumes, each of which were accompanied by the most delicious PDF liner notes, consisting of period pictures and retro-styled new artwork, Simon reached back a decade into the 70s for BCM 6. And to follow that, BCM 7 set out to tackle the 90s. And this was where I came in.

After Simon put out his request for submissions, I felt I had to contribute, given that the 90s were my most musically prolific years, and the decade where I finally realised my dreams of owning synths and sequencers. In 1996, after many years of trying to get a job that paid enough for me to save, I finally amassed enough cash to buy some proper professional gear, rather than the hotch-potch of equipment I had been tinkering with until that point. I ventured down to the now long since departed Turnkey music store (aka Soho Soundhouse) on London’s Charing Cross Road and bought a Roland SC-88VL and an Evolution MK-149 controller that came bundled with a Cubase clone software sequencer called Evolution Audio.

I had deliberated long and hard about how to spend this money and the offer that Turnkey had on the SC-88VL was too good to miss. If I recall correctly, it had been reduced by almost 50% to about £369 and the MK-49 was going for about £110. I knew I had to get the most for my money and that pristine GS/GM soundset seemed to cover all of my bases. And the bundled sequencer with the MK-149 sealed the deal. These two items, coupled with my fairly new, custom built PC, featuring a Soundblaster AWE64 soundcard, would be all I needed to make full on compositions on my own. Later on, I purchased a few editions of the Twiddly Bits MIDI File series which enabled me to use professionally created MIDI files to mess around with filter and cutoff settings within the SC88-VL, which had no direct controls over those features, as well as using some of their arpeggio files to spruce up my compositions. Little did I know that these files were being created by Dave Spiers of GForce Software, who would later become a good friend of mine!

I remember how I felt, later that night, after hooking it all up and finally being able to multi-track a composition in my own front room… the independence was dizzying and over the next few months, stuff seemed to pour out of me. I’d stay up till the early hours finishing up stuff, recording it onto a cassette, playing it in the car on the way to work, annoying work colleagues with it during lunch breaks and generally feeling like I was on my way to achieving something. It didn’t last though (hence the name of this blog!). As I managed to earn and save more, I bought more gear, and I noticed a correlation between the amount of gear I had and my productivity declining. Coupled with a failing marriage, long working hours and the onset of Obstructive Sleep Apnoea, my musical output went the same direction as my libido, i.e south.

Many years later, I discovered a cassette of my early works and digitised them into WAV files. Later on, I uploaded them to SoundCloud and there they sat, garnering the occasional piece of praise, for which I was always grateful. That was until BCM 7. I listened back to these songs, chuckled at their naivety, and picked one for submission. And lo and behold, it got picked!

So, go and download this thing. The first 200 downloads are free. After that, it’s £3, or as much as you want to pay. You can also stream directly from the Bandcamp page or from this embedded player (I’m track 34, by the way)…

The 104 page PDF is worth the price alone, and a printable cassette J-Card is also provided for those die-hards who want to “keep it real” and dub to cassette. I know I’ll be doing that 😉

I don’t get a cut, but then I was never expecting this stuff to ever earn me anything. I’m just happy to have been selected and to know that a piece of my music has been deemed good enough for inclusion with 41 other exceptionally gifted artists.

Listen to the extended version of ‘Progress’ here…