paulmakesmusic

I first got online about 10 years ago. I'd heard of the internet before that. In fact I had a PC for a few years before then (and various spectrums, amigas, electrons, etcgoing right back to the mid 1980's) but had never actually surfed the net until then.

At that point, I was living in a council flat in Moreton. I'd spent a long time on my own, either on the dole or on the sick, and spent a lot of time countering the loneliness and boredom by getting as drunk or as stoned as I could.

And what I did while I was drunk or stoned or both was either to play long winded computer games, like Civilisation, or The Settlers, or I would make music.

The music was something I did for myself. It was a means of internal expression, rather than a way of sharing something inside myself with the world. I never really thought of myself as someone who could perform in public or anything. The music tended to be repetitive. Simple loops that gradually developed without ever departing from a basic chord structure. Thw words I was writing to go with the tunes were self pitying, self absorbed, introverted. I'd be mortified if most of the stuff I did ever got heard by anyone else to be honest.

Still, when I first got online, I used the nickname "paulmakesmusic" extensively on a variety of sites. Later, when I started to get out of the rut I'd trapped myself in, I found I had less of a desire to make music. Partly because it didn't sound so good when I was no longer getting stoned all the time, and partly because I had better things to do than gaze at my own navel and wallow in self pity.

Many of the people reading this blog will know me better as "PMM". Or as Paul of course. As the music became abbreviated, so did the username.

Apparently a lot of people (the majority?) find hearing their own voices played back at them embarrassing, and this is certainly true of me. I've been told by others that I have a lovely voice, but that doesn't change how I feel about it.

But is wasn't all bad. There are some pretty tunes in there. Tonight I found an old CD with a load of stuff on it. The CD isn't in very good nick, so I'm trying to transfer what I can over to my hard drive before I do anything else with it. The CD is causing havoc with my system. Crashing and hanging and what have you. Still I shall perservere.

Some of the files are linked to programs that I don't have installed on my PC. Programs like cakewalk and rebirth and acid loops.

A lot of the files wouldn't really mean anything on their own. I'd generally multitrack stuff, creating individual bits of sound that would then be fitted together, like the pieces of a jigsaw.

What? Like this one you mean?



Yes. Precisely. This one started with a drum machine, and had two layers of acoustic guitar and 4 layers of vocal overlaid onto it. There's a slightly corrupted bit in the middle for some reason. It's OK really. It only catches a middle eight bit, and the best guitar work occurs at the end I think. I suppose the overlaying of a spinning globe was a bit corny, but this is The whole Damn world afterall.

And this one is essentially a midi tune, hence the metronomic drumbeat. I like it. It soars, hence the video.