The most musically related thing I can think of sharing is that when I was a kid, my mom bought me and my sister a little Yamaha keyboard. It was fun to play around with, but I never was very musically inclined. Fast forward nearly 40 years, and I see this video by the 8-bit guy
Hah, those old Yamaha toy keyboards are great.* My aunt and uncle had one when I was young; the demo tune made a big impression on me. Spent
years trying to track it down, but they'd long since gotten rid of it and there were a million different ones to dig through.
Finally identified it thanks to
people posting keyboard demos on YouTube, and not a week later one turned up on the local Craigslist
Still have it.
* (One of my one-of-these-days projects, once I'm a bit more up on my low-level electronics knowledge, is to put together a proper knob-per-function synthesizer keyboard based around the OPL2 - it's just simple enough to be practical, compared to the 4-operator FM chips.)
Meantime, having spent over a decade playing around with tracker music after taking a couple years of piano lessons and getting nowhere, I tried to recreate what I remembered of it, failed completely, but got inspired in trying to evoke those memories/moods in myself and ended up sailing off in a very different direction, resulting in
a fairly ambitious composition that I'm still pretty proud of, realized in Jeskola Buzz with a handful of VST instruments.
After that, I moved away from virtual synthesizers when I started getting into real ones. I'm not as prolific as I used to be, but I've put together
a few different tracks with some of the different pieces of gear that I've gone through since then.
And since I got involved in the music team at my church, I've finally started to pick back up on playing, after all these years. I'm most comfortable on piano/keyboards (including a Hammond M3 I picked up a few years back - wanted one for
ages,) but I also play bass and dabble a bit with electric guitar. Music is just fun to
do, even if I'm not as proficient at it as I'd like...
As far as stylistic preferences, I enjoy a pretty broad swath of genres; my parents raised me on Baroque classical, '80s Christian contemporary, and '50s - '60s pop/rock, I get some exposure to popular music of the '80s - '90s as that's what all the classic-rock stations are playing these days, and I picked up an interest in oldschool electronic music as I was getting into synthesizers. But my true favorite is definitely '70s progressive rock - Pink Floyd, Yes, original Genesis, ELP, and so on and so forth. I could listen to that stuff all day.
(Coming back 'round to computers, didja know that Herb Schildt, known for a number of questionably-accurate books on programming, was the original keyboardist for very-definitely-not-a-Yes-tribute-band Starcastle? Despite the
obvious influence, they actually had a couple pretty good albums back in the day...)
