It’s Beepy, with 8 E’s
I have been playing music for decades. It started at Primary School – when I was 8 I learned to play the violin, under the tuition of Mr. Protheroe, and over the next few years I passed Grade 1, 2 and 3. At age 13 I passed the audition to become a member of Wigan Youth Orchestra, joining a strong Second Violin team, and we played in large venues to paying audiences. At aged 15, Mr. Protheroe was, ironically, the person who made me not want to continue to play the violin. During my school years I also learned piano and keyboard, both of which I still enjoy playing.
When I was 18 my parents bought me an electronic guitar. It was, and still is, a black Aria Pro 2 Wildcat. I played that guitar for hours a day throughout that year, and it was something I would pick up and play daily for many years. Nowadays, although I still own my original Aria, I tend to play my guitalele more than anything else. For the uninitiated, a guitalele is a 6 string guitar, but the size of a large Ukulele.
I have always enjoyed electronic music more than playing an instrument, though. In 1982 I received a 48k ZX Spectrum for Christmas and, as a ZX81 owner up that point, I loved the noise that the Spectrum generated. I learned little bits of BASIC, including the essential BEEP command, and was soon making my own music in 48k. From there I progressed to music software like WHAM – The Music Box, to Music Maestro which made use of the 48k beeper and of the 128ks three channel AY sound chip. EVERY tune I wrote sounded fantastic to me, and yet whenever I played them to my Mum she would say “It just sounds like beeps.” That is why my first album is called Just Beeps.
The 8 bit era had games with music which was hugely influential to me, written by musical geniuses like Rob Hubbard, Matt Gray, and David Whittaker. If a cassette or album had been released in the 80s of just 8 bit music back in the 80s, I’d have been straight to Our Price to see if it was in stock!
The Atari ST was next, and I spent hours making music in different Trackers that had been given away on magazine cover disks. My cousin gave me a copy of Quartet, music software for arranging samples as notes on a stave, and writing music in Quartet would consume the next year of my life. Later I bought a 32 note MIDI sequencer on a floppy disk from a Computer Fair at the Norbreck Hotel in Blackpool (around 1992-ish) and, thanks to the Atari ST’s inbuilt MIDI ports, was able to play and record directly to the machine.
Over the following years I composed music on PC, mobile, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Switch, and most recently on the Spectrum Next using NextDAW.