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 creating music electronically 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, because in my head I could ‘hear’ the full orchestral sound that I was trying to achieve. The limitations of the 8 bit machines meant that the output never quite matched what I was aspiring to create. Whenever I played them to my Mum, because she didn’t have the benefit of hearing what I was aiming for, 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 written by people who were hugely influential. Musical geniuses like Rob Hubbard, Matt Gray, and David Whittaker. If a cassette or album had been released 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, Spectrum Next, and most recently on the Nintendo Switch.
Outside of music I own the worlds oldest surviving 80s website, 80sNostalgia.com, which was created in 1999 and given to me in 2004 by a stranger on the internet. The artist name Beeeeeeeepy is a reference to the 80s – it’s Beepy with 8 E’s.