Free music! Note I didn’t say GOOD music, but…hey! Free music!
While I was working on PDF Level 2, there were a couple of places where I seriously thought about dredging up some of my much earlier musical creations – back from the pre-loop-driven days – to drop at least an excerpt in as needed, with the idea of seeing if anyone noticed that this obviously wasn’t something done with Music Generator. The problem, when I went to listen to the specific old piece of music I had in mind, was that any half-deaf dog-food-eating possum could tell the difference from tape hiss alone. I ditched the idea for the sake of getting the DVD out on time, but I still found myself wondering if it was possible to clean up my old recordings, a few of which are getting dangerously close to 20 years old (!!). After Evan went to bed tonight, I set about doing precisely that – or at least trying to.
The results still aren’t perfect; in a few places the “fix” actually ate the frequency response for dinner. In others, it worked freakin’ wonders. The amount of tape hiss to eliminate on any given piece was frightening. In most cases, even the noise reduction introduced its own problems, so I dropped a bit of reverb (and occasionally another effect or two) in to cover those problems. I played around with “Perseids” so much that it became a whole different animal. The results aren’t perfect, but they’re at least interesting enough that I thought I’d share ’em.
Anyway, without further doodoo, here are some free tracks for your amusement. They’re all instrumentals, though I’m not exactly an expert musician by any stretch – especially not on the guitar (before we were married, my wife once heard the guitar-oriented tracks and asked “Are you tone deaf!?” Maybe there’s something to that… 😆 ). For me, it’s always about getting the song out of my head and preserved in some other medium, just in case something horrible and/or biologically improbable happens to my head.
Enjoy! (The original unrestored tracks can be heard here for comparison purposes.)… Read more
