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SONGS BY IAN '87




Ian C Stewart "Song Ideas 1987 01" MP3 + "Song Ideas 1987 02" MP3

Lucky you, two tracks today from the next tape in the seemingly endless supply of tapes recorded by me. The only information given this time is "Song Ideas by Ian '87" written on the cover. Okay. That tells us almost nothing. But that's still more information than many of my tapes have on them. I've always been bad about writing stuff like that down.

Both sides of this 60 minute cassette were filled with all manner of silliness involving a Mattel Synsonics toy drum machine, a wee jobby of a toy Casio PT-80 keyboard and distorted guitar. I'm pretty sure that to this day I've never listened to this tape. It was probably cranked out in an afternoon or two. I should listen to it sometime, shouldn't I. I might've cured cancer or something.

I've never been ashamed of my ability to rock a funky beat with the Synsonics. Oh, no. And I could even break out a thrash/polka/country beat when needed. Or when not needed, as the case may be.


Today's first piece features a good deal of fiddling with the buttons on the left side of the Casio PT-80 keyboard. The keyboard itself was monophonic in the extreme and the chord buttons were meant for accompaniement or whatever, I think it's like an organ sound. But you can change the backing chord to all kind of minor sevenths and what not. So the first piece features an extended meditation on those particular keys.


With the Synsonics, I usually tuned the tunable tom down to function as a bass drum. I almost never tuned it any higher than a low click. And this track demonstrates why! The tom, when tuned to a middle note, just sticks out like crazy. It's pretty funny now but I don't think it was meant to be.

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh........ The second song is a distorted guitar riff with Synsonics drums. The main part was meant to be a thrashy uptempo metal thing and then there's the requisite circa 1987 Mosh Part where it goes half time. Who could forget mosh parts? Thank you, Anthrax, for that essential thrash metal cliche.

The riff was most likely jammed off the top of my fluffy head.
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Comments

Darrin said…
heh... i laughed at the end when you did the 'atypical chinese melody' on the drums and then followed that up with the 'shave and a haircut' on the guitar. funny! nice drum programmage. i wouldn't have thought it possible to program in different beats on that thing. i'm pretty sure the yamaha dd-5 couldn't do that. though, i think the dd-5 did midi-triggering whereas the synsonics did not. i could be wrong there though.
September 14, 2007 at 2:06 PM
Ian Stewart said…
You are correct, no MIDI on the Synsonics. But I never could get any decent funk happening with the Yamaha. Not for lack of trying either!
September 14, 2007 at 5:45 PM
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