Playing with a Toy (Roland D-5)

Written in 1991 / Recorded in 1991 and 2013

Roland D-5 was the first digital synthesizer I bought sometime in the middle of 1990. At that time, I was playing an analogue synthesizer by Roland, which I was borrowing from one of my generous friends, and I wanted to have another supplemental synthesizer for enhancing my performance as a keyboardist in the band. Due to busyness while I was playing in the band, it took a bit longer before I began to explore things available on this modest priced digital synthesizer. Once the time has come, I became quite obsessed with trying out every built-in tone and function enough long to establish the imagination for writing this experimental tune. 

There are little more to talk about this tune, which could be better labelled as a demonstration performance of this particular model of Roland synthesizer, accompanied with a properly written Theme section in the intro, outro and a few times in between, which are played in accordance with each section’s demand. As for the outro, I newly added some bits including the guitar because the original demo version was utterly unsuccessful due to the basic scheme stemmed from writing and arranging stage in the first place. Except for these new additions, the original demo was entirely played by the Roland D-5 synthesizer.

Let My Funeral Go Flamboyantly

Written and Recorded in 1991

Ideas I combined for making this instrumental stuff mostly came from an arrangement I made for solo piano to play You Don’t Miss Your Water Till Your Well Runs Dry, live on stage a couple of years earlier. The song was written by William Bell and I first heard it in an album by Taj Mahal. While I used the chord progression of the arrangement as the key structure of this tune, I also have to admit that inspiration for the main melody owes to the Closing theme featured at the end of Reunion in Central Park album by the (Original) Blues Project.

I was (and am) not satisfied with the way this tune is finally delivered – I think the tune is bit too long and I could have played solos on the guitars to make it better – but I remember the tune represented a special emotion I had at that time; to finish off my life as a student. I thought the tune would fit the funeral ceremony to bury myself as a student but if I could see my younger self, all I would like to tell him is ‘life goes on.’

Dreamin’

Written and Recorded in 1988

A home recorded two-chord jam played by myself. Needless to say, this was not a serious composition but a personal recording for my own fun purpose. I partially added the tone of percussions I am unfamiliar with on the programmable rhythm machine to pay my tribute to some of my fellow students then, who were enthusiastic about playing Latin music.

I physically played the bass guitar, acoustic piano, organ-toned keyboard and the lead guitar. For experimental purpose, I also played the trumpet without knowing how to play it. Though it features colourful layers of different instruments, it doesn’t sound much heavy, perhaps due to the effect of Ping-Pong recording, a primitive method used on analogue equipment with a limited number of recordable tracks. Though it was not the ideal method for recording things like this, I felt a certain satisfaction for the result, which sounds like floating in the air as if I am dreaming for some extent.

Serenade to a Singing Princess

Written and Recorded in 1990

I guess it took me about a few weeks to write and record this instrumental tune and there were certain time lags during the time of composing. Initially, perhaps ideas emerged through my random piano playing as usual and it seems that, according to a notebook I used at that time, I thought about compiling the ideas to form a piece of Classical music. This initial intent might have been soon interrupted due to the addition of a Swing-like bridging section in the middle and at this point, I decided to write a lyric that goes with the tune. I remember at least I tried out the lyric with my own voice once and the song was about walking on a pleasant autumn day.

One day during such a pleasant autumn, while I was still working on this tune, I went to see a concert held within my college site. It was one of the casual concerts by a mixed choir, which belonged to the students’ musician union of the college, and having a look at such one was a normal activity for members of the union. Through such activities, I took to be familiarised with Classical music and though I didn’t have a particular interest in choir music, I was quite impressed by a female singer’s performance on that stage.

When I got back home to continue finishing my work, I changed my mind to dedicate this tune to the female singer I saw in the concert, by removing my silly voice part and renaming it Serenade to a Singing Princess. Shortly before that, I remember the tune was provisionally titled Underground Hollywood, referring to a chapter from a memoir written by Ultra Violet, a book I was reading then, despite the tune had nothing to do with Andy Warhol’s Superstars.

Death Song (Instrumental)

Written and Recorded in 1990

Death Song was a thing of an outburst of my anger and frustration I held at the time of writing. Before the song was recorded in any form, it was played live for filling the stage time as a solo act of me playing the guitar and singing. One of the reasons why I dared to play it at that occasion was because the anger was caused by the provisional band I had to play with on that day. What surprised me at the most was that the audience’s response was quite good towards the song, which I wrote and played in despair. 

The demo recording of the song at home soon followed and in it, I simply played it in the same manner as the prior live take and added rhythm sections for enhancing its (Hard) Rock aspect. But this did not meet my satisfaction so that I fancied to convert the key features of the song into some different style. Inspiration came from Lanky (Part One), an instrumental jam by Syd Barrett, officially released for the first time in 1988, which was yet a hot material at that time for me. I borrowed the idea of a jam consists of rough playing guitar and vibraphone-like keyboard to give a basic structure for the recording as a whole. Then, I added rhythm sections to enhance this basic structure.

Though this second attempt was yet not satisfying, I decided to make this video by cutting off some parts of the long jam section to make the whole material shorter and put it go with the footage taken from the original live performance, which captured the initial raw emotion of myself at the very beginning of this composition.

  

Moon on a Swing

Written and Recorded in 1990

I bought a compact digital effect designed for the keyboard during the autumn of 1990, to furnish the sound of the digital synthesizer, which I bought shortly prior than that, for playing it with a band. Despite the compact digi-box had many built-in effect programmes, I only used its basic reverb effect while I was playing in the band because I was more packed with practising and playing, rather than sound making. After being liberated from the band and some other stuff, I took time for exploring the built-in programmes on the digi-box, which were mainly consisted of a combination of reverb and delay effects. During the careful examination of each effect programmes, one of them caught my attention. I do not remember how the programme called by the manufacturers, but I found its’ stereo echoing effect not only playful but also useful to cover my low skill at playing the keyboard. You can listen to the result by playing the video above and I hope you like it.