Mike, the lead singer of PG13 and my ongoing partner in Musical Crime came to me with several odd proposals in the years 1989-1991. Some of them resulted in some odd garage-funk music that we called "Spongebath", but today I'll tell you about one of the two "Rock Operas" we almost started. One was a musical history of Sammy Davis Jr called Yes I Can that we never actually wrote any music for, but give us 10 min and we could sing the whole thing out. I have half of a sketch from the dramatic intro, but it never materialized. We imagined a great "Sammy loses his eye" moment recording a ping pong ball bouncing across the floor, and someone shouting from the kitchen "MY EYE!" Perhaps it is better that we didn't do more with this.
The other we actually wrote music for. Six Crises, the Opera based on the book by Richard Nixon of the same name.
The first song we wrote was actually me alone: I was watching CNN Headline News in the apartment I shared with Erik, and there was something on about white bigots in South Africa, and this man looked a bit like Santa Claus but more Dutch, and he was spewing some particularly florid hatrid "We cannot allow them to take our land, rape our women, kill our children. We will FIGHT until the bitter end". But what was amazing was his VOICE: He had the most silken deep voice, a voice you'd love to hear telling you bedtime stories. A voice that probably had a beautiful laugh. A voice put to a very evil service. I couldn't believe my ears, and the next half hour of my life was wasted as I raced to find a videotape so I could capture this man's voice, since Headline news repeated their stories ever 30 min. I actually had to wait a full hour for this particular piece, but it was worth it.
Immediately, I got to work on a piece of music that was menacing and plodding, sounding a bit like a military march with low horns and some distorted synths percolating in the background. By this time I had my Yamaha SY77, which had some very good brass and strings sounds, and I was able to sound somewhat epic. It built and built, until everything dropped away and I dropped this voice in: I had filled the memory of my Akai S950 with this sample, and it was too big for a single disk, so I had to use it or lose it.
It wasn't a long song, under 4 minutes, but it was long enough to. We listened to it together and the voice gave us chills - Mike didn't even know where it had come from, but he was captivated. We decided this would be the music for the chapter on Alger Hiss.
But the music had its own contained presence and we never could add lyrics to it. We just called it Alger Hiss and let it sit over to the side on tape. We never loaded that sample up again, never worked on that idea again. There's something to be said for a sound demanding to be worked with, and that experience being DONE with. I never did a sample grab from TV after that, either. Done.
The other song we did was far more lighthearted - we imagined it to be Dick singing to Pat, making a statement of purpose before striding out the door to get his ass handed to him by Kennedy in 1960. It was called "This I Believe".
Right around this time I got the LinnDrum, and so the song was built around a slightly swung groove on the Linn, with the SY77 horns and strings, TX81z cutting through with percussive bass, and the Juno playing Organ as it did so often in the spongebath days. We wrote the song and cut the instrumental, but Mike never shared with me exactly how it would sound... until we played at the Seventh Street Entry in late Spring 1990, warming up for a rival synthpop band "X-Ray Kiss".
Mike pulled out all of the stops singing this, and I'm fortunate to have captured this on video because it was a true work of art. The video, by the way, was shot on a camcorder I had purchased just days earlier from Daytons, where they had a very generous return policy. And yes, that camcorder returned to Daytons just days later, before the 10 day cutoff. The salesmen were righteously pissed...
After that, we sort of let the Rock Opera thing drop, but it wasn't the end of our projects by any means.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Spring 1997 - A Different "Cube"
My time with the ValueRx Reporting team had been going well, though having moved the team here, is was becoming apparent that this team would be pretty straightforward and... well... dull. Writing reports isn't really the most glamourous job. But one day, Mike and Mark had a wild new idea.
Now, Mike and Mark shared the cube next to mine and Cobol Guy's, and they peeked their heads over frequently. And one day they peeked over and DEMANDED I join them in the conference room immediately. So I went... Mike had discovered something called "Data Warehousing" and wanted to tell me about it. He tried to explain:
"So you have a CUBE. And we're talking about CARS. So down one side, it's colors - Red, Blue, Silver, Black, White. And across the top it's 2-door, 4-door, wagon, van. And along the back side it's brands - Ford, Chevy, Dodge, Mercedes. And inside this cube is NUMBERS. So you go 'Red, 2 Door, Dodge = 5' and 'Silver, Wagon, Mercedes = 3' oh and these are sales figures."
Much as you probably are in reading this, I sat completely confused while he drew and re-drew the cube, finally scribbling in the middle "ANYTHING CAN BE IN HERE - IT'S INCREDIBLE". I furrowed my brow and nodded meaningfully, muttering, "yes, I think I see... there's really some potential there..."
Turns out there was a Data Warehouse project already under way, but it had stalled out under the watchful eye of a Price Waterhouse billing farm (2 persistent resources, then 3-5 greenies rotating through every 2 months, generating almost nothing). My job was to wrest control from Price Waterhouse and get the project back on track. Which wasn't easy because I had no fricking idea what this cube thing was.
Fortunately, Mike was a big fan of learning on the job: We ordered "the bible" of data warehousing by Ralph Kimball: We liked his writing style better that Bill Inmon and Claudia Imnoff's take on the subject - they were much more dry. Not that we actually read much of the book - both Mike and I are learn-by-doing people, so after the preface and the first 2 chapters, the spine wasn't cracked on the book.
We also booked travel to a conference of "The Data Warehouse Institute" in San Diego... and we learned a lot. Some things we learned: Conferences are almost useless, expense reports are rarely scrutinized, and martinis are delicious. We were very bad boys. But we actually learned at the conference that whatever data warehousing really was, what we were already doing wasn't terribly far FROM it. Thus energized and vitalized, we returned to really tear up the DW, and I'm pleased to say we actually did a good job.
Ok - I'll back up and actually define this now: Data Warehousing is taking data FROM your core transactional systems and moving it TO a new system that has been specifically optimized for reporting... but not boring invoicing reporting: Analytical reports: Show me Sales by region by salesperson by product line... now resort that so that product line is the primary sort, roll it up to region, now show me only the bottom 10% of our product line.... A well designed warehouse allows your team to have truly interactive access to your company's information, "turning data into knowledge".
Our warehouse was far from that - it was basically a huge dump of claims data, growing and growing. The reports you wrote against this were not fundamentally different than the ones you'd write against the invoicing system... but at least they didn't slow down the main system anymore. But we wanted things to be better.
Another Martini-fueled evening, this time at the Monte Carlo in downtown Minneapolis, and Mike, Mark, and I came up with our new strategy: Data Marts: You take your data warehouse and create even smaller subsets of data, at pre-calculated summary levels: You ditch the lowest level of data and just store the numbers (the facts) and the dimensions (colors, brands, styles): This was the cube that Mike was ranting about, but in truth, none of us had truly grokked it yet. The concept had been there from the beginning but all at once, we truly UNDERSTOOD it (after a few drinks and steak!). We drew it out on a napkin and brought it into work the next day and started planning...
The night seemed magical because our new CEO (who we DID like) Kevin wandered through the restaurant: We imagined ourselves to be insanely cool, to have come up with this great strategy and to have been hobnobbing in the same restaurant as our CEO.
By Spring 1997, we had moved to a new location - corporate headquarters built just for us, and on day one, we were already out of space. I wanted to punch the facility planner (who oddly was a cousin-in-law of mine). Mike and I had wrested control of the warehouse entirely away from Price Waterhouse and they were in the final throes of the handover. I was the lead architect, and Mike had a new title: Director of Data Warehousing. Whoah. He was a Director! He was actual MANAGEMENT. And he was 32! And with my promotion to architect, my friends at Safenet wrangled a rate increase. And two weeks after that, Mike TOLD about the rate increase, and I went right to my buddy Jay, and caught him trying to tell me there wasn't an increase. Dude tried to pocket the increase flat out. Which was extra-dirty pool. Caught, he increased my rate, but not before grumbling that the rate increase was really HIS because he had negotiated it, so I shouldn't have cared as long as I was being paid an acceptable rate.
Yeah. So I soon severed my relationship with Safenet... in a pretty awesome move.
Now, Mike and Mark shared the cube next to mine and Cobol Guy's, and they peeked their heads over frequently. And one day they peeked over and DEMANDED I join them in the conference room immediately. So I went... Mike had discovered something called "Data Warehousing" and wanted to tell me about it. He tried to explain:
"So you have a CUBE. And we're talking about CARS. So down one side, it's colors - Red, Blue, Silver, Black, White. And across the top it's 2-door, 4-door, wagon, van. And along the back side it's brands - Ford, Chevy, Dodge, Mercedes. And inside this cube is NUMBERS. So you go 'Red, 2 Door, Dodge = 5' and 'Silver, Wagon, Mercedes = 3' oh and these are sales figures."
Much as you probably are in reading this, I sat completely confused while he drew and re-drew the cube, finally scribbling in the middle "ANYTHING CAN BE IN HERE - IT'S INCREDIBLE". I furrowed my brow and nodded meaningfully, muttering, "yes, I think I see... there's really some potential there..."
Turns out there was a Data Warehouse project already under way, but it had stalled out under the watchful eye of a Price Waterhouse billing farm (2 persistent resources, then 3-5 greenies rotating through every 2 months, generating almost nothing). My job was to wrest control from Price Waterhouse and get the project back on track. Which wasn't easy because I had no fricking idea what this cube thing was.
Fortunately, Mike was a big fan of learning on the job: We ordered "the bible" of data warehousing by Ralph Kimball: We liked his writing style better that Bill Inmon and Claudia Imnoff's take on the subject - they were much more dry. Not that we actually read much of the book - both Mike and I are learn-by-doing people, so after the preface and the first 2 chapters, the spine wasn't cracked on the book.
We also booked travel to a conference of "The Data Warehouse Institute" in San Diego... and we learned a lot. Some things we learned: Conferences are almost useless, expense reports are rarely scrutinized, and martinis are delicious. We were very bad boys. But we actually learned at the conference that whatever data warehousing really was, what we were already doing wasn't terribly far FROM it. Thus energized and vitalized, we returned to really tear up the DW, and I'm pleased to say we actually did a good job.
Ok - I'll back up and actually define this now: Data Warehousing is taking data FROM your core transactional systems and moving it TO a new system that has been specifically optimized for reporting... but not boring invoicing reporting: Analytical reports: Show me Sales by region by salesperson by product line... now resort that so that product line is the primary sort, roll it up to region, now show me only the bottom 10% of our product line.... A well designed warehouse allows your team to have truly interactive access to your company's information, "turning data into knowledge".
Our warehouse was far from that - it was basically a huge dump of claims data, growing and growing. The reports you wrote against this were not fundamentally different than the ones you'd write against the invoicing system... but at least they didn't slow down the main system anymore. But we wanted things to be better.
Another Martini-fueled evening, this time at the Monte Carlo in downtown Minneapolis, and Mike, Mark, and I came up with our new strategy: Data Marts: You take your data warehouse and create even smaller subsets of data, at pre-calculated summary levels: You ditch the lowest level of data and just store the numbers (the facts) and the dimensions (colors, brands, styles): This was the cube that Mike was ranting about, but in truth, none of us had truly grokked it yet. The concept had been there from the beginning but all at once, we truly UNDERSTOOD it (after a few drinks and steak!). We drew it out on a napkin and brought it into work the next day and started planning...
The night seemed magical because our new CEO (who we DID like) Kevin wandered through the restaurant: We imagined ourselves to be insanely cool, to have come up with this great strategy and to have been hobnobbing in the same restaurant as our CEO.
By Spring 1997, we had moved to a new location - corporate headquarters built just for us, and on day one, we were already out of space. I wanted to punch the facility planner (who oddly was a cousin-in-law of mine). Mike and I had wrested control of the warehouse entirely away from Price Waterhouse and they were in the final throes of the handover. I was the lead architect, and Mike had a new title: Director of Data Warehousing. Whoah. He was a Director! He was actual MANAGEMENT. And he was 32! And with my promotion to architect, my friends at Safenet wrangled a rate increase. And two weeks after that, Mike TOLD about the rate increase, and I went right to my buddy Jay, and caught him trying to tell me there wasn't an increase. Dude tried to pocket the increase flat out. Which was extra-dirty pool. Caught, he increased my rate, but not before grumbling that the rate increase was really HIS because he had negotiated it, so I shouldn't have cared as long as I was being paid an acceptable rate.
Yeah. So I soon severed my relationship with Safenet... in a pretty awesome move.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Summer 1998 - The Studio Falls
In April 1998, I became a homeowner. Finally leaving years of rentals, my wife and I moved to an older house in Edina, built in 1913. And one of my "gifts" from my kind wife was a large room for my studio. Much larger than any room I had (except for the Death Star configuration of 1992 when I took over the center of a living room in a huge old apartment), but with a catch: There was a high traffic corridor bisecting the room. So the usable contiguous space in the studio was "just" a large L shape, not a full Rick Wakeman surround. Even a "U" configuration would be difficult. Some things would just have to go.
A couple of my things had gone in the months prior to us buying the house: We were making a full 20% downpayment, and there were a few thousand to be had by sloughing off some of my lesser used bits of gear. The Rhodes Chroma made its way out in 1997, going abroad to a nice man named Clive. The OB8 left even before that (I never truly bonded with that synth). The Simmons Drums had gone by 1996...
Around this time, a strange music store had opened in NorthEast Minnespolis: Wedged into the front half of a plumbing supply store, this outfit was one guy who always looked 3 hours short on sleep... but ALL he did was strange european things. See, by 1995, some crazy Swedes created a "Virtual Analog Synth" called the Nord Lead. And while I saw them all over the music magazines, nobody in Minneapolis had one. But this guy did. And it sounded great.... but not as great as my Jupiter8. And it only had 4 voices...
But it was only the beginning... the Europeans were coupling new DSP technology with old school user interface design, creating new synths that looked bold, sounded huge, but were easy and fun to use.
In Spring 1998, my guy got in a bit of gear that changed everything for me. He got an Access Virus. This was built by germans and had completely unreasonable specs: 16 voices, each with 2 oscillators. up to 16 different parts could be addressed, and routed to 3 stereo outputs. It had separate chorus and delay for each voice. And most importantly, it sounded INCREDIBLE - as good as my Jupiter 8 did to my ears.
And so I revisited my manifesto: I had got into these vintage synths because I was tired of the horrible user interfaces of the synths of 1990. I was tired of the digital sampled sound of those days, and the "play this preset" mentality. I moved to old synths not just because they sounded good, but because they had an immediacy to programming, AND because they were DIRT CHEAP during that brief window of time.
But by 1998, I was feeling the limitations as well: They were big and heavy and generated a lot of heat. They required lots of cables. They wandered out of tune, and never sounded quite the same from day to day. And frankly, I had used the hell out of them and was ready for some fresh sounds.
So yes, my friends, I traded my huge, heavy, beautiful Jupiter 8 for a tiny red box with knobs. Finally, new technology that sounded as good as my old stuff, but had a great user interface and was fun to use. The Access Virus had it all.
Within 4 months, everything else was gone, and in its place was one Fatar SL990 controller keyboard and five modules: A Roland JV1080, an Akai S5000, an Access Virus A, a Waldorf Microwave XT, and a Nord Lead 2. One MIDI interface, and two 8-channel audio snakes is all I needed. And it was incredible.
I tell you now, and you'll never believe me, but I didn't shed a tear for a single piece of that vintage gear... It wasn't until years later that I began to pine for the Jupiter 8 again. But everything else... It was ok. Some serious nerd was happier than I was with it. And The Good Guys (my repair shop) was considerably poorer without my regular visits.
A couple of my things had gone in the months prior to us buying the house: We were making a full 20% downpayment, and there were a few thousand to be had by sloughing off some of my lesser used bits of gear. The Rhodes Chroma made its way out in 1997, going abroad to a nice man named Clive. The OB8 left even before that (I never truly bonded with that synth). The Simmons Drums had gone by 1996...
Around this time, a strange music store had opened in NorthEast Minnespolis: Wedged into the front half of a plumbing supply store, this outfit was one guy who always looked 3 hours short on sleep... but ALL he did was strange european things. See, by 1995, some crazy Swedes created a "Virtual Analog Synth" called the Nord Lead. And while I saw them all over the music magazines, nobody in Minneapolis had one. But this guy did. And it sounded great.... but not as great as my Jupiter8. And it only had 4 voices...
But it was only the beginning... the Europeans were coupling new DSP technology with old school user interface design, creating new synths that looked bold, sounded huge, but were easy and fun to use.
In Spring 1998, my guy got in a bit of gear that changed everything for me. He got an Access Virus. This was built by germans and had completely unreasonable specs: 16 voices, each with 2 oscillators. up to 16 different parts could be addressed, and routed to 3 stereo outputs. It had separate chorus and delay for each voice. And most importantly, it sounded INCREDIBLE - as good as my Jupiter 8 did to my ears.
And so I revisited my manifesto: I had got into these vintage synths because I was tired of the horrible user interfaces of the synths of 1990. I was tired of the digital sampled sound of those days, and the "play this preset" mentality. I moved to old synths not just because they sounded good, but because they had an immediacy to programming, AND because they were DIRT CHEAP during that brief window of time.
But by 1998, I was feeling the limitations as well: They were big and heavy and generated a lot of heat. They required lots of cables. They wandered out of tune, and never sounded quite the same from day to day. And frankly, I had used the hell out of them and was ready for some fresh sounds.
So yes, my friends, I traded my huge, heavy, beautiful Jupiter 8 for a tiny red box with knobs. Finally, new technology that sounded as good as my old stuff, but had a great user interface and was fun to use. The Access Virus had it all.
Within 4 months, everything else was gone, and in its place was one Fatar SL990 controller keyboard and five modules: A Roland JV1080, an Akai S5000, an Access Virus A, a Waldorf Microwave XT, and a Nord Lead 2. One MIDI interface, and two 8-channel audio snakes is all I needed. And it was incredible.
I tell you now, and you'll never believe me, but I didn't shed a tear for a single piece of that vintage gear... It wasn't until years later that I began to pine for the Jupiter 8 again. But everything else... It was ok. Some serious nerd was happier than I was with it. And The Good Guys (my repair shop) was considerably poorer without my regular visits.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Spring 1994 - Contracting Hell
I first recounted a version of this tale on my personal blog... but I'm revising it and posting it here, because it is a CLASSIC Tale of the Nineties.
By early 1994, I had done 9 months of good work for my Dad, learning Cobol, and our first release of our software was in the client's hands. Dad took a call from a headhunter friend, and he forwarded the contact on to me. One thing led to another, and I took a programmer job for an outsource code shop. Prior to this, COBOL was something I did with my dad. This was my first chance to take the skill to the street and see if this could be an actual career for me.
As first gigs go, it was pretty low-profile: I was a subcontractor working for a subcontractor, working for a contractor, working for a telephone company in southern Minnesota. I was paid $15/hr, and told to bill 40 hours a week, no matter what I was doing. With 3 subcontracting firms above me, I am guessing that the client must have been paying at least $50/hr for my work, with everyone taking between $5-10/hr off the top.
Still, this was my big entree: I was going to make $30k a year. The recruiter said the gig was for 12 months. I could BANK on that. Of course, I needed to get corporate attire: 3 pairs of slacks, 5 dress shirts, 5 ties, 1 pair of shoes. The old man fitting me for these things commented the pants "look good across the beam" while appraising my tush. Which was a lie, since I was still around 135 lbs and over 6 feet tall. But it takes all kinds.
Also, having lived in the city and having divested myself of my very bad automobiles, I needed some way to get to and from Eden Prairie. So we bought a NEW CAR. A Nissan Altima, Sea Blue, that we named Evenrude. It was a wonderful car.
We were in an office plaza in Eden Prairie, the dress was business formal (shirt, ties, slacks), there were 6 of us in this office. I shared an office with a woman just a little older than I was. In the back were the "mainframe guys" who literally did nothing but play card games on the computer all day. One other guy would stare at lines of code all day. One slept. This was before the world wide web - I can only imagine what THAT would have been like.
For 4 weeks, I was given nothing to do. NOTHING. But bill 40 hours, and say I was doing "Conversion" work. Turns out, this shop was in the SLOW and LABORIOUS process of converting a system from MainFrame to something else... very very very slowly. Bored, I surfed through the code library, trying to make sense of what the system did (boring billing stuff), and see what massive changes were needed. As I said in an earlier post - I'm not so great with reading for reading's sake: I'm goal oriented: What needs doing, and by gum it'll get DONE.
Finally, after 4 weeks, they gave me an assignment: Take this one program, and convert it. It should take 2 weeks, they said. I took this program, and God as my witness, all I could see it needed was ONE LINE of code changed to work properly. So I did it. And my boss said "you're not done, this will take two weeks". Which I took to mean there was something else I needed to do. So i got in there and started to do some additional improvements, I reformatted the output to work on standard printers, I changed some of the input parameters to match PC keyboards better....
And after 2 weeks of puttering, my boss said "it'll take another week". So a week LATER, they sent off the code. And one week AFTER THAT, the top-level contracting firm called up and yelled at me for making all of those changes, what was I STUPID??? So I immediately backed out those changes, just did the one line of code, and shipped it off 10 minutes later.
8 weeks, and only one program modified, and only one LINE of code modified. And I had made almost $5000. And it felt TERRIBLE. I talked to others in the office, and they all said "kid, relax, this is an easy gig - enjoy it! The next one won't be like this and you'll remember this fondly". Really.
The boss called me into his office and said that "the clients wanted me fired, but he talked them into giving me another chance". I said thank you for the opportunity, but I don't think this is right for me. I walked out. Actually I'd like to say I walked out, but I gave two weeks notice, did nothing but show up for 80 more hours, made another grand. Sigh.
It was back to my dad's basement for a few months (and I am forever grateful to him for his employment in that period... since I had a car payment and everything!!!)
Two gigs later, I ran into one of the Mainframe Guys in the shop: He had taken ill and there was some code that NEEDED to get done. I filled in, and the work that was supposed to be 80% done hadn't been started, but that was ok because the two weeks he had said he needed turned out to have been only about 30 minutes of code on my part. I didn't make a big deal out of it... but I did learn some lessons about trusting people: there are a lot of people in this business who are not interested in working very hard, and are not above deception to keep themselves comfortable.
I am not one of those people.
By early 1994, I had done 9 months of good work for my Dad, learning Cobol, and our first release of our software was in the client's hands. Dad took a call from a headhunter friend, and he forwarded the contact on to me. One thing led to another, and I took a programmer job for an outsource code shop. Prior to this, COBOL was something I did with my dad. This was my first chance to take the skill to the street and see if this could be an actual career for me.
As first gigs go, it was pretty low-profile: I was a subcontractor working for a subcontractor, working for a contractor, working for a telephone company in southern Minnesota. I was paid $15/hr, and told to bill 40 hours a week, no matter what I was doing. With 3 subcontracting firms above me, I am guessing that the client must have been paying at least $50/hr for my work, with everyone taking between $5-10/hr off the top.
Still, this was my big entree: I was going to make $30k a year. The recruiter said the gig was for 12 months. I could BANK on that. Of course, I needed to get corporate attire: 3 pairs of slacks, 5 dress shirts, 5 ties, 1 pair of shoes. The old man fitting me for these things commented the pants "look good across the beam" while appraising my tush. Which was a lie, since I was still around 135 lbs and over 6 feet tall. But it takes all kinds.
Also, having lived in the city and having divested myself of my very bad automobiles, I needed some way to get to and from Eden Prairie. So we bought a NEW CAR. A Nissan Altima, Sea Blue, that we named Evenrude. It was a wonderful car.
We were in an office plaza in Eden Prairie, the dress was business formal (shirt, ties, slacks), there were 6 of us in this office. I shared an office with a woman just a little older than I was. In the back were the "mainframe guys" who literally did nothing but play card games on the computer all day. One other guy would stare at lines of code all day. One slept. This was before the world wide web - I can only imagine what THAT would have been like.
For 4 weeks, I was given nothing to do. NOTHING. But bill 40 hours, and say I was doing "Conversion" work. Turns out, this shop was in the SLOW and LABORIOUS process of converting a system from MainFrame to something else... very very very slowly. Bored, I surfed through the code library, trying to make sense of what the system did (boring billing stuff), and see what massive changes were needed. As I said in an earlier post - I'm not so great with reading for reading's sake: I'm goal oriented: What needs doing, and by gum it'll get DONE.
Finally, after 4 weeks, they gave me an assignment: Take this one program, and convert it. It should take 2 weeks, they said. I took this program, and God as my witness, all I could see it needed was ONE LINE of code changed to work properly. So I did it. And my boss said "you're not done, this will take two weeks". Which I took to mean there was something else I needed to do. So i got in there and started to do some additional improvements, I reformatted the output to work on standard printers, I changed some of the input parameters to match PC keyboards better....
And after 2 weeks of puttering, my boss said "it'll take another week". So a week LATER, they sent off the code. And one week AFTER THAT, the top-level contracting firm called up and yelled at me for making all of those changes, what was I STUPID??? So I immediately backed out those changes, just did the one line of code, and shipped it off 10 minutes later.
8 weeks, and only one program modified, and only one LINE of code modified. And I had made almost $5000. And it felt TERRIBLE. I talked to others in the office, and they all said "kid, relax, this is an easy gig - enjoy it! The next one won't be like this and you'll remember this fondly". Really.
The boss called me into his office and said that "the clients wanted me fired, but he talked them into giving me another chance". I said thank you for the opportunity, but I don't think this is right for me. I walked out. Actually I'd like to say I walked out, but I gave two weeks notice, did nothing but show up for 80 more hours, made another grand. Sigh.
It was back to my dad's basement for a few months (and I am forever grateful to him for his employment in that period... since I had a car payment and everything!!!)
Two gigs later, I ran into one of the Mainframe Guys in the shop: He had taken ill and there was some code that NEEDED to get done. I filled in, and the work that was supposed to be 80% done hadn't been started, but that was ok because the two weeks he had said he needed turned out to have been only about 30 minutes of code on my part. I didn't make a big deal out of it... but I did learn some lessons about trusting people: there are a lot of people in this business who are not interested in working very hard, and are not above deception to keep themselves comfortable.
I am not one of those people.
Fall 1992 - TX Treasure
When I think of the vintage gear tsunami I fell into, it's remarkable to think it really "only" lasted 2 years - first toe in the water in 1991, last great deal found in 1993, after which point I started to retire pieces of gear. One great find for me was the TX816.
I believe this beast was actually built in 1985: Eight Yamaha DX7 synthesizers in single rack, with just a few buttons and one angry red 2-digit LED for each. You couldn't program these things from the front panel - they were strictly for playback. But by this time I was using a bit of software from Opcode called "Galaxy" which offered visual editing and library management on my Mac (which in 1992 was STILL my SE - imagine, I actually used the same computer for 5 years), so I could load up my favorite sounds and let it rip, and I could tweak them in the editing software.
The TX816 was sort of legendary for me - while it was heavily used by a lot of very hack-y sounding LA musicians (who used the 8 synths to layer up the most lush fake electric piano patch ever), it was championed by my sequencing hero David Gamson of Scritti Politti. If you listen to Cupid+Psyche, you'll hear all of these little clavinet-synth sounds, all a little different, weaving lines of melody, trading parts, almost like a Bach Invention. That was the power of the TX - you had all this SOUND to work with, but all of the sounds were sort of SMALL, so they could dance around eachother without making the mix a mess.
If you're wondering what this sounded like... try to remember "Things Can Only Get Better" by Howard Jones - that funky bassline with a little clavinet interplay - that was the classic DX sound.
Listening to my tracks from this time period, I hear all 8 of those synths going - some doubling lines, one synth being used just for a triangle sound twice in the track... It was ridiculous luxury to be throwing the sonic power of a full DX7 (when new, a $2500 synth) to that single purpose.
I found the TX in a second-hand store in St Paul called Encore Music - they typically had used synths I WASN'T interested in, but I made the rounds anyway. There was always a Korg Poly 61, or a Crumar Stratus, or a Roland Juno-6, or a early 1980s E-Piano module of ill repute and sound... but it was always worth looking. And one day, I saw the TX816 sitting there, with a treasure almost as great: 8 20 foot XLR Cables (high quality) with 1/4" adaptors. $800 for the works, and honestly the cabling was worth at least $200 of that. I couldn't say no, and took it home.
Of course, this officially overloaded my mixer, so I needed to get a second 16-channel submixer. And it was a little noisy, so this was what brought the noisegate into my house. So all told, it was at least $1200 of "deal", but it still felt like a deal, considering not 6 years earlier this would have cost in at least $5000. In fact, watching the auction prices, TX816s STILL go for around $800, having peaked up to closer to $1400 by the late 1990s. So while it wasn't a $200 Jupiter 8, it was still a good deal.
The TX wound up leaving the arsenal in one of the earliest rounds of studio pruning in 1995: By that time, I had used it on a few dozen tracks, but had fallen into a familiarity with the sound, every time I dialed it in, I was using it for similar things, and I fell out of love with its reedy thin sound. And having a huge coil of cables running behind everything was getting to feel unreasonably cluttery. I found a good home for it for a bit more than I paid for it.... and it never cost me anything in service costs (which I can't say about my other big treasure I haven't told you about yet).
I believe this beast was actually built in 1985: Eight Yamaha DX7 synthesizers in single rack, with just a few buttons and one angry red 2-digit LED for each. You couldn't program these things from the front panel - they were strictly for playback. But by this time I was using a bit of software from Opcode called "Galaxy" which offered visual editing and library management on my Mac (which in 1992 was STILL my SE - imagine, I actually used the same computer for 5 years), so I could load up my favorite sounds and let it rip, and I could tweak them in the editing software.
The TX816 was sort of legendary for me - while it was heavily used by a lot of very hack-y sounding LA musicians (who used the 8 synths to layer up the most lush fake electric piano patch ever), it was championed by my sequencing hero David Gamson of Scritti Politti. If you listen to Cupid+Psyche, you'll hear all of these little clavinet-synth sounds, all a little different, weaving lines of melody, trading parts, almost like a Bach Invention. That was the power of the TX - you had all this SOUND to work with, but all of the sounds were sort of SMALL, so they could dance around eachother without making the mix a mess.
If you're wondering what this sounded like... try to remember "Things Can Only Get Better" by Howard Jones - that funky bassline with a little clavinet interplay - that was the classic DX sound.
Listening to my tracks from this time period, I hear all 8 of those synths going - some doubling lines, one synth being used just for a triangle sound twice in the track... It was ridiculous luxury to be throwing the sonic power of a full DX7 (when new, a $2500 synth) to that single purpose.
I found the TX in a second-hand store in St Paul called Encore Music - they typically had used synths I WASN'T interested in, but I made the rounds anyway. There was always a Korg Poly 61, or a Crumar Stratus, or a Roland Juno-6, or a early 1980s E-Piano module of ill repute and sound... but it was always worth looking. And one day, I saw the TX816 sitting there, with a treasure almost as great: 8 20 foot XLR Cables (high quality) with 1/4" adaptors. $800 for the works, and honestly the cabling was worth at least $200 of that. I couldn't say no, and took it home.
Of course, this officially overloaded my mixer, so I needed to get a second 16-channel submixer. And it was a little noisy, so this was what brought the noisegate into my house. So all told, it was at least $1200 of "deal", but it still felt like a deal, considering not 6 years earlier this would have cost in at least $5000. In fact, watching the auction prices, TX816s STILL go for around $800, having peaked up to closer to $1400 by the late 1990s. So while it wasn't a $200 Jupiter 8, it was still a good deal.
The TX wound up leaving the arsenal in one of the earliest rounds of studio pruning in 1995: By that time, I had used it on a few dozen tracks, but had fallen into a familiarity with the sound, every time I dialed it in, I was using it for similar things, and I fell out of love with its reedy thin sound. And having a huge coil of cables running behind everything was getting to feel unreasonably cluttery. I found a good home for it for a bit more than I paid for it.... and it never cost me anything in service costs (which I can't say about my other big treasure I haven't told you about yet).
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Fall 1996 - The Cube
After being confirmed as "Master of the Abacus" there was work to be done at ValueRx. Lots of work. Well, actually not that much work. Scratch that. NO work. See, there was still a fully functioning department running in Detroit - the work hadn't actually MOVED to Minneapolis yet. They were staffing up for the EVENTUAL work that was to appear. But they hired a good 2 months too early.
Now to be fair, in 1996 people were starting to worry about a thing called Y2K - where thanks to disk-space saving techniques employed in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a very real possibility that computer systems would think that the year 2000 would be the year 1900. Financial services and insurance industries were particularly concerned - interest and annuity calculations, AR aging, etc. So by 1996, most forward-looking institutions were scooping up people who knew COBOL and putting them to work on rewriting vast acres of code - millions of lines of linear procedural code. And this was before the "object oriented" revolution where you make a widget and call out to it, no, basic date calculations were cut and pasted into these long long long programs.
For the record, I never needed to work on a Y2K project. I did do some minor work to make sure that the freight shipping software I helped build would handle it, but that was it.
Anyway, COBOL guys were going fast, and their prices were going up. So it was smart to build a team in advance... but we who were hired early were a bit mystified. And there was a lot of finger-pointing in the ranks of the transition team as to who was to blame for the delays in bringing the work to Minneapolis... Angry James was in the middle of a lot of those discussions, but Mark and Mike were spared, since they were just carrying out the directions.
So what we had: Office space. Staff. Chairs. What we didn't have: MUCH office space, computers. We were double-cubed, with one computer to share. I was in a cube with a traditional Cobol guy... who really liked playing Solitaire. For my part, I liked surfing the new-fangled WEB. We were in this cube 8 hours a day, and took 30 minute turns at the computer, doing nothing.
After a few weeks, we at least got copies of the source code to start reviewing... and by 6 weeks in, the first Detroit Transplants started arriving, and bringing with them actual WORK. But I'm going to level with you, those first 6 weeks were very surreal, because I was paid 40 hours a week to really do nothing. In a different way from the telephone billing system scam in 1993 - that was 6 weeks with no hope. This was just 6 weeks of idleness with the expectation that things would be getting CRAY-ZAY soon enough.
My cubemate, being a very traditional coder, was beyond thrilled when the source code came available, and would enter trance-like states of staring at screens and screens of code, taking meticulous notes. Being who I was, I could review code for maybe 20 minutes before glazing over: Tell me what you need the code to DO, and I'll make it DO it. But "learn the code?" Ugh.
So I started my now-classic method of "when you're bored, find a meeting and sit in on it". And I participated. And before I knew it, they asked me to be the team lead for the Reporting team, because I liked to get to the heart of the problem and solve issues, not just talk about it. Which was awkward for the ACTUAL team leader, who had relocated from Detroit, and was very very used to being the "Skip" of the team, guru of knowledge, and giver of long timeframes for fixing things. When I jumped in and by the next morning had the solution to the problem she said would take 3 weeks to resolve, I was not making a friend.
But I was young - like a puppy dog. Not even 30 years old - I had not yet settled into the comfort of a job you can keep doing for 20 years. (and for the record, I have still not settled into that). I didn't KNOW I was stepping on toes, I honestly thought they'd be thrilled that I found the solution. HA.
Fortunately, the people in charge who had decided to make the move from Detroit were all relatively new to the organization, and weren't fixed in their ways. They saw me not only as Master of the Abacus, but as "someone who gets things done". This reputation would serve me well in early 1997... But let's stay in 1996 for just a moment longer.
In late 1996, near the holidays, the CEO of the company paid us a visit: By this time, the Detroit people had moved in: Over 40 IT people had uprooted their families and decided to move to Minneapolis for their career. Prior to this, ValueRx had offices in Minneapolis, Detroit, Connecticut, and Arizona. This move was to centralize all operations, and allow the company to be more lean and agile.
The CEO popped in and called an impromptu meeting in our lunchroom: 40 people, some from Detroit, some from Arizona, some new employees, some contractors, all crunched into a stinky-microwave lunchroom, while one floor down a much more comfortable conference room sat, unused, because nobody thought to plan this out. The guy (his name is lost to the ages for me, and I refuse to google him) started a half-hearted "thanks for coming together, gang" speech... and a few minutes in, his cellphone rang. He reached to his belt clip and unhooked his then-awesome StarTac flipphone, and took the call. Standing in the middle of a ring of people. He simply pretended we weren't there. For 5 minutes. It was the most rude thing - he didn't excuse himself, he didn't ask the person to call back. In that moment, we just didn't exist to him.
He snapped the phone closed, finished his little speech and asked if we had any questions for him. Someone from Detroit asked him when the corporate offices in Connecticut were moving to Minneapolis, since all of the other divisions already had. His answer:
"We're going to keep that office open - it's just a few of us out there, and my wife likes our neighborhood, and the kids are in a good school, so we're staying out there. We can manage remotely."
After a pep talk about sacrifice for the company, and thanks for relocating. It was incredible. He then scurried off to a meeting, leaving us all in stunned silence.
I think 4 people quit that day, and many more of the people who were planning to relocate decided NOT to do so. Heck, these were COBOL people, and as I mentioned, it was 1996 - there was plenty of work for COBOL people then. In fact, I think that was about the point at which the local people in Minneapolis got a whole lot more work, as the transplants and the stay-behinds all found lucrative work elsewhere.
I will also note that within 3 months, there was a new CEO as well.
Now to be fair, in 1996 people were starting to worry about a thing called Y2K - where thanks to disk-space saving techniques employed in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a very real possibility that computer systems would think that the year 2000 would be the year 1900. Financial services and insurance industries were particularly concerned - interest and annuity calculations, AR aging, etc. So by 1996, most forward-looking institutions were scooping up people who knew COBOL and putting them to work on rewriting vast acres of code - millions of lines of linear procedural code. And this was before the "object oriented" revolution where you make a widget and call out to it, no, basic date calculations were cut and pasted into these long long long programs.
For the record, I never needed to work on a Y2K project. I did do some minor work to make sure that the freight shipping software I helped build would handle it, but that was it.
Anyway, COBOL guys were going fast, and their prices were going up. So it was smart to build a team in advance... but we who were hired early were a bit mystified. And there was a lot of finger-pointing in the ranks of the transition team as to who was to blame for the delays in bringing the work to Minneapolis... Angry James was in the middle of a lot of those discussions, but Mark and Mike were spared, since they were just carrying out the directions.
So what we had: Office space. Staff. Chairs. What we didn't have: MUCH office space, computers. We were double-cubed, with one computer to share. I was in a cube with a traditional Cobol guy... who really liked playing Solitaire. For my part, I liked surfing the new-fangled WEB. We were in this cube 8 hours a day, and took 30 minute turns at the computer, doing nothing.
After a few weeks, we at least got copies of the source code to start reviewing... and by 6 weeks in, the first Detroit Transplants started arriving, and bringing with them actual WORK. But I'm going to level with you, those first 6 weeks were very surreal, because I was paid 40 hours a week to really do nothing. In a different way from the telephone billing system scam in 1993 - that was 6 weeks with no hope. This was just 6 weeks of idleness with the expectation that things would be getting CRAY-ZAY soon enough.
My cubemate, being a very traditional coder, was beyond thrilled when the source code came available, and would enter trance-like states of staring at screens and screens of code, taking meticulous notes. Being who I was, I could review code for maybe 20 minutes before glazing over: Tell me what you need the code to DO, and I'll make it DO it. But "learn the code?" Ugh.
So I started my now-classic method of "when you're bored, find a meeting and sit in on it". And I participated. And before I knew it, they asked me to be the team lead for the Reporting team, because I liked to get to the heart of the problem and solve issues, not just talk about it. Which was awkward for the ACTUAL team leader, who had relocated from Detroit, and was very very used to being the "Skip" of the team, guru of knowledge, and giver of long timeframes for fixing things. When I jumped in and by the next morning had the solution to the problem she said would take 3 weeks to resolve, I was not making a friend.
But I was young - like a puppy dog. Not even 30 years old - I had not yet settled into the comfort of a job you can keep doing for 20 years. (and for the record, I have still not settled into that). I didn't KNOW I was stepping on toes, I honestly thought they'd be thrilled that I found the solution. HA.
Fortunately, the people in charge who had decided to make the move from Detroit were all relatively new to the organization, and weren't fixed in their ways. They saw me not only as Master of the Abacus, but as "someone who gets things done". This reputation would serve me well in early 1997... But let's stay in 1996 for just a moment longer.
In late 1996, near the holidays, the CEO of the company paid us a visit: By this time, the Detroit people had moved in: Over 40 IT people had uprooted their families and decided to move to Minneapolis for their career. Prior to this, ValueRx had offices in Minneapolis, Detroit, Connecticut, and Arizona. This move was to centralize all operations, and allow the company to be more lean and agile.
The CEO popped in and called an impromptu meeting in our lunchroom: 40 people, some from Detroit, some from Arizona, some new employees, some contractors, all crunched into a stinky-microwave lunchroom, while one floor down a much more comfortable conference room sat, unused, because nobody thought to plan this out. The guy (his name is lost to the ages for me, and I refuse to google him) started a half-hearted "thanks for coming together, gang" speech... and a few minutes in, his cellphone rang. He reached to his belt clip and unhooked his then-awesome StarTac flipphone, and took the call. Standing in the middle of a ring of people. He simply pretended we weren't there. For 5 minutes. It was the most rude thing - he didn't excuse himself, he didn't ask the person to call back. In that moment, we just didn't exist to him.
He snapped the phone closed, finished his little speech and asked if we had any questions for him. Someone from Detroit asked him when the corporate offices in Connecticut were moving to Minneapolis, since all of the other divisions already had. His answer:
"We're going to keep that office open - it's just a few of us out there, and my wife likes our neighborhood, and the kids are in a good school, so we're staying out there. We can manage remotely."
After a pep talk about sacrifice for the company, and thanks for relocating. It was incredible. He then scurried off to a meeting, leaving us all in stunned silence.
I think 4 people quit that day, and many more of the people who were planning to relocate decided NOT to do so. Heck, these were COBOL people, and as I mentioned, it was 1996 - there was plenty of work for COBOL people then. In fact, I think that was about the point at which the local people in Minneapolis got a whole lot more work, as the transplants and the stay-behinds all found lucrative work elsewhere.
I will also note that within 3 months, there was a new CEO as well.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Spring 1991 - Vintage
From 1984-1990, I prided myself on having pretty cool new gear: My first synth was a Yamaha DX9, which was the nouveau of the nouveau (even if it sounded like a reedy kalimba with zero power... I ran that thing thing through a chorus, and then later a flanger just to get some meat on the sound...). From there, I was buying new gear at a healthy rate, but in a strange pocket: Never the best, never the worst: I was a straight up midrange playa. And even from the beginning, I had sequencers and drum machines rather than tape machines and good mixers. Somehow that whole "program it for live" thing was in my DNA from the very beginning.
If you were paying attention in the 1980s, the second half of the decade was a horrible one for synthesizers: Yes there were some great machines, but what we were losing were knobs and sliders: Synths were becoming pre-set machines that you could edit if you wanted to search through menus and squint at a 2x40 lcd. You sure as heck weren't going to whip up a new sound in the middle of a gig. I felt pretty strongly about this: I even wrote a letter to Keyboard Magazine that got printed, and it was "letter of the month" lamenting the lack of feel in the new synths...
It wasn't all bad - you had synths with 16 or 32 voices that sounded better than the Fairlights that made us all drool in 1984 - some even had the same waveforms, so you could sort of live your Fairlight dreams, just without the light pen. And I was buying these synths, selling them off after 9-12 months, and going for the next one. I kept Torps Music in Minneapolis going for a while... at least until one day when the keyboard salesguy hollered "hey, it's the money guy". I walked out and never returned.
Anyway, by 1990-1991, I was getting bored of the whole new-box-does-everything mode, and was looking for a thrill. At the time, I was writing a LOT of music, by the way - usually 1-2 new songs a week. The period from 1990-1992 was insanely fertile: over 200 songs. The point is, I was chewing through gear, but it was being USED - I can still listen to any track and tell you exactly what was making what sound. I loved my gear. BUT the state of new music gear in 1991 was pitiful: Roland was recycling the D50 sound engine yet again, Korg had new versions of the M1... Even yamaha with their commitment to strange sounds in FM was only releasing "sample player" instruments.
And sounds on the records... people weren't even trying anymore: they'd buy the new synth, dial up the presets, and record the song. So if you bought that new synth, you either had to use the same sounds (easy), or commit to programming your own signature sound... and did I mention that you'd be doing that with the small display, 4 buttons, 1 slider, and a single dial? Yeah, not very fun.
But in 1990/1991, something magical happened: People started selling off their old gear to get these new machines. Now I understand a guy who is in a YES cover band needing to have a synth that 1) he can carry, 2) stays in tune, and 3) is capable of sounding like more than the synth at the end of ELP "Lucky Man". These are working people, and they were making choices.
And in the process, they were selling the synthesizers that I dreamed about in the early 1980s. My first true vintage purchase was a Roland Jupiter 8. MINT condition. For two hundred dollars. It didn't have a midi interface (I added that myself for another $150), so I could see why the seller wanted to upgrade. But this synth.... it was incredible. This is the synth that percolated behind Duran Duran RIo. Most of Howard Jones "Human Lib" was on this synth. This is a desert island synth, sitting perfect in any mix.
My next purchase was a midi'ed LinnDrum. This classic drum machine from 1983 was limited from a 1991 perspective (16 sounds, as opposed to the 100 drum sounds in 8 meg of ROM in the new Roland R8), but this was the sound of almost every synthpop record from 1983-1986. The drums were in Heaven 17, Human League, even Dead or Alive. And it was covered in buttons and sliders - it was ridiculously easy to use, and it sounded great.
When I think of the gear I added in that 2 year period, it is almost insane, and yet my total outlay was under $3000, which was a lot less than the flagship Kurzweil K2000 supersynth was selling for. I added a Simmons SDS7 brain for $75, and a trigger-to-midi interface for another $50 (the thick Ksssshhhhh drum sounds of synthpop). I bought an Oberheim OBXa for $350 (The Time, Prince, Thompson Twins, and more).
Two treasures: A Rhodes Chroma for $200. This was the last ARP synth, and had a strange fragile sound - used as the lead synth on Rockit by Herbie Hancock, and also used by The Fixx. It wound up the lead on a lot of my tracks. And a MemoryMoog for $550, once owned by local rock legends The Suburbs (I saw that synth on stage many times) - I named it "Dr Voltage" for its huge sound... but truth be told it was insanely unstable and couldn't be relied upon to sound the same from hour to hour... I used the Doctor very sparingly in my compositions.
There were things I passed up. I didn't buy the Oberheim 4 Voice for $300, because it was too huge. I didn't buy any of the minimoogs because they didn't have MIDI, and I wanted/needed to be able to sequence these things (remember - I was a trigger-it-live guy, not a tape guy.) I never bought a TB303 Bassline - even with the acid factor, it just sounded wonky.
So my studio by late 1991 was a full half of the bedroom, creeping toward the ceiling on some seriously overloaded Ultimate Support stands. And I sat there with my Mac SE (still!) running Performer (Still!) running all of these synths into a cheap Tascam line mixer (though the noisier ones got routed through a noise gate), and printing my compositions directly to DAT - never printing the individual tracks.
I'd leave the gear up and on until the song was done. I'd set the verse up on a loop, and bring in synths, twirling the knobs and setting the sliders to find the perfect sound... it was very "of the moment" and I never saved the sounds back - that sound was for that song, and that was it. Print it, move on.
I had no shortage of musical ideas - they were flying out of my head faster than I could keep up anyway, so I never really thought about posterity or replications... I was thinking that if I ever really needed to do a song again, I'd probably do it BETTER then next time. That's what I told myself, but in truth, the few times I did try to do a remake, the sound was different enough that I considered it a new song entirely....
There were a few more treasures that made their way into the studio in 1992, but that will be another post. But Spring 1991, the arrival of the vintage... it was an amazing time, and I made some great music with those machines. What happened to them? Yeah, that's another post again.
If you were paying attention in the 1980s, the second half of the decade was a horrible one for synthesizers: Yes there were some great machines, but what we were losing were knobs and sliders: Synths were becoming pre-set machines that you could edit if you wanted to search through menus and squint at a 2x40 lcd. You sure as heck weren't going to whip up a new sound in the middle of a gig. I felt pretty strongly about this: I even wrote a letter to Keyboard Magazine that got printed, and it was "letter of the month" lamenting the lack of feel in the new synths...
It wasn't all bad - you had synths with 16 or 32 voices that sounded better than the Fairlights that made us all drool in 1984 - some even had the same waveforms, so you could sort of live your Fairlight dreams, just without the light pen. And I was buying these synths, selling them off after 9-12 months, and going for the next one. I kept Torps Music in Minneapolis going for a while... at least until one day when the keyboard salesguy hollered "hey, it's the money guy". I walked out and never returned.
Anyway, by 1990-1991, I was getting bored of the whole new-box-does-everything mode, and was looking for a thrill. At the time, I was writing a LOT of music, by the way - usually 1-2 new songs a week. The period from 1990-1992 was insanely fertile: over 200 songs. The point is, I was chewing through gear, but it was being USED - I can still listen to any track and tell you exactly what was making what sound. I loved my gear. BUT the state of new music gear in 1991 was pitiful: Roland was recycling the D50 sound engine yet again, Korg had new versions of the M1... Even yamaha with their commitment to strange sounds in FM was only releasing "sample player" instruments.
And sounds on the records... people weren't even trying anymore: they'd buy the new synth, dial up the presets, and record the song. So if you bought that new synth, you either had to use the same sounds (easy), or commit to programming your own signature sound... and did I mention that you'd be doing that with the small display, 4 buttons, 1 slider, and a single dial? Yeah, not very fun.
But in 1990/1991, something magical happened: People started selling off their old gear to get these new machines. Now I understand a guy who is in a YES cover band needing to have a synth that 1) he can carry, 2) stays in tune, and 3) is capable of sounding like more than the synth at the end of ELP "Lucky Man". These are working people, and they were making choices.
And in the process, they were selling the synthesizers that I dreamed about in the early 1980s. My first true vintage purchase was a Roland Jupiter 8. MINT condition. For two hundred dollars. It didn't have a midi interface (I added that myself for another $150), so I could see why the seller wanted to upgrade. But this synth.... it was incredible. This is the synth that percolated behind Duran Duran RIo. Most of Howard Jones "Human Lib" was on this synth. This is a desert island synth, sitting perfect in any mix.
My next purchase was a midi'ed LinnDrum. This classic drum machine from 1983 was limited from a 1991 perspective (16 sounds, as opposed to the 100 drum sounds in 8 meg of ROM in the new Roland R8), but this was the sound of almost every synthpop record from 1983-1986. The drums were in Heaven 17, Human League, even Dead or Alive. And it was covered in buttons and sliders - it was ridiculously easy to use, and it sounded great.
When I think of the gear I added in that 2 year period, it is almost insane, and yet my total outlay was under $3000, which was a lot less than the flagship Kurzweil K2000 supersynth was selling for. I added a Simmons SDS7 brain for $75, and a trigger-to-midi interface for another $50 (the thick Ksssshhhhh drum sounds of synthpop). I bought an Oberheim OBXa for $350 (The Time, Prince, Thompson Twins, and more).
Two treasures: A Rhodes Chroma for $200. This was the last ARP synth, and had a strange fragile sound - used as the lead synth on Rockit by Herbie Hancock, and also used by The Fixx. It wound up the lead on a lot of my tracks. And a MemoryMoog for $550, once owned by local rock legends The Suburbs (I saw that synth on stage many times) - I named it "Dr Voltage" for its huge sound... but truth be told it was insanely unstable and couldn't be relied upon to sound the same from hour to hour... I used the Doctor very sparingly in my compositions.
There were things I passed up. I didn't buy the Oberheim 4 Voice for $300, because it was too huge. I didn't buy any of the minimoogs because they didn't have MIDI, and I wanted/needed to be able to sequence these things (remember - I was a trigger-it-live guy, not a tape guy.) I never bought a TB303 Bassline - even with the acid factor, it just sounded wonky.
So my studio by late 1991 was a full half of the bedroom, creeping toward the ceiling on some seriously overloaded Ultimate Support stands. And I sat there with my Mac SE (still!) running Performer (Still!) running all of these synths into a cheap Tascam line mixer (though the noisier ones got routed through a noise gate), and printing my compositions directly to DAT - never printing the individual tracks.
I'd leave the gear up and on until the song was done. I'd set the verse up on a loop, and bring in synths, twirling the knobs and setting the sliders to find the perfect sound... it was very "of the moment" and I never saved the sounds back - that sound was for that song, and that was it. Print it, move on.
I had no shortage of musical ideas - they were flying out of my head faster than I could keep up anyway, so I never really thought about posterity or replications... I was thinking that if I ever really needed to do a song again, I'd probably do it BETTER then next time. That's what I told myself, but in truth, the few times I did try to do a remake, the sound was different enough that I considered it a new song entirely....
There were a few more treasures that made their way into the studio in 1992, but that will be another post. But Spring 1991, the arrival of the vintage... it was an amazing time, and I made some great music with those machines. What happened to them? Yeah, that's another post again.
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