This page is dedicated to my love of music and my own little attempts to do something on my own. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer (MS-IE), you should have heard a short phrase from one of my songs. If not, here are several options:

This piece was made by using the computer:

• background track 'composed' with the 'Rhythm Brainz PLUS' software
  • just mouse clicking on the instruments and notes you want to have
  • used drums, bass and organ
  • output into a standard midi file
• overdubbing with guitar (a real one! custom Telecaster type)
  • the midi file played through the standard 'mplayer'
  • guitar fed into soundcard via microphone
  • both recorded at the same time with 'wave shaper', output as .wav file
• overdubbing with second guitar
  • previous .wav file played through 'mplayer' - nice, same software handles so many different file types
  • again recording 'mplayer' output and second guitar with 'wave shaper'
• converting into Internet suitable sizes
  • original .wav files were recorded at highest quality level of 44.1 kHz, stereo, 16 bit which results in 10 MB per minute
  • using 'wave shaper' to transform into 4 bit mono ADPCM format or 8 bit mono standard PCM
  • using 'RA encode' to transform into 'RA player' format

If you try to do follow these steps, make sure you have a soundcard that can play and record at the same time. I am using a german made Terratec Maestro 32/96 PnP, which has pretty good wavetable sounds built in.

I will add some more music pretty soon, which was recorded with a regular 4 track tape recorder - I only need to get the right plugs to connect it to the soundcard.

Comparing the computer based recording to the analog way, I still think, that analog sounds very good - adding some little distorsions - that we all love and are missing now with CDs. The above described way still lacks possibilities of rearranging later, i.e. adding echo to previously recorded tracks - it's just like bounced track recording. And additionally the computer radiates a lot of noise into my tube guitar amp and through the pickups. It is hard to stay away from the computer and at the same time start the recording.

At this point, I didn't find any affordable software, that will do a real multitrack recording and will use the benefits of Win95. Recommendations welcome!

Using the RA encoding, I was hoping, you could listen to the piece while downloading. But I would have to use a real RA server, which is not provided by AOL or compuserve to my knowledge. Otherwise it still downloads first. And I am not very happy with the soundquality produced by this compression. It is very picky about peeks, which will result in bad clicking noises. That's why this sample has a lot lower volume.

Stay tuned!