More introductions: music and me

Music has always been a large part of my life.

I remember when the Beatles became famous (say autumn 1963); my friends and I stood in the school playground and formed musical groups on the spot. Little did it matter that none of us could play a musical instrument.... A few years later I had some tuition with the recorder and violin, but didn't really get on with them. Maybe a year later there was a year of piano lessons.

It wasn't until I was 12 (which means 1968) did I find an instrument with which I felt comfortable: the folk guitar. I learnt mainly by listening and trying out things; although I bought sheet music and Bert Weedon's 1001 chord shapes for guitar, I never had a teacher. A few years later, I thought that I was quite proficient, and began writing songs.

Although there were brief periods when I was in a "band" (most noticeably a period 1975-1977), normally there weren't any other musicians around in my environment, and so I had to develop as a solo musician. At first, this was ok as I was still very "singer-songwriter" influenced, but later on being solo became a problem, as I was no longer capable of playing the music that I was hearing in my head. As a result, I near enough gave up playing in the early 80s.

Even though I wasn't playing very much, I was certainly listening to music, and in the early 90s I joined the email pioneers in Israel when I became the proud owner of a dialup mail account. One of the first things which I did with this account was to join the original Richard Thompson mailing list and so receive daily postings from people around the world. I was surprised how well known Richard had become since I had last seen him in 1977....

Anyway, the people on this mailing list decided to produce a cassette of their performances of RT songs. Naturally, I had to join in, but I decided that I wasn't going to do a guitar based performance as almost everyone else; no, I was going to make a MIDI track. Now I know that many people are dead against MIDI, but for me, it was the ideal opportunity to realise all the musical ideas that I had in my head. All I had to do was decant them into a sequencer, and the computer would do the rest. I had an acquaintance (still do) who had a MIDI setup with keyboard and sound modules, so I went to his house, and within a few hours produced a version of 'Has he got a friend?' from Richard and Linda's "Bright Lights" album.

For the next few weeks, I listened to it, alternately appalled at the sound and excited at the possibilities. When I calmed down, I sequenced another RT song and then another ... and then I was off! It wasn't long before I was sequencing my own songs and then recording them to cassette with live vocals.

Of course, over the years, my equipment and techniques have improved greatly. Now I'm using a wonderful program called Reason, although I'm sure that I'm not using it in the way that it was intended. One of the good things about the program is that there are many ways of working with it, so whilst I might have an unusual approach, I am getting results.

After a sixteen year long hiatus, I started writing songs again at the end of 1998, and I've kept at it ever since. But whereas once I used to write by thrashing around on the guitar, these days the songs come via wandering hands on the keyboard. I find that this makes a change in the resulting song, although some of my friends find it difficult when listening to my discs to distinguish between what was written then to what was written now.

I must admit that over the years it's become harder and harder to write lyrics, so these days I'm concentrating on creating instrumental tracks only. You can find some of them at this site.