Gary Peek's music |
Warning/Disclaimer- A full range audio system with good bass response is required to adequately reproduce some of the sounds in this music.
These songs were made with computer controlled electronic circuits to produce the synthesizer, synthesizer bass, and drum sounds. However, this was long before digital sampling devices of this type were widely available and affordable, therefore, I designed and made my own hardware.
The synthesizer is made from scratch with a used organ keyboard and electronic piano circuits, which unlike sampled sounds, have few harmonics (making the lower frequency sounds it generates difficult to hear on mediocre sound systems.) The drum and cymbal sounds are based on damped oscillators and gated white noise, and are a crude approximation of drum sounds by today's standards.
The computer used to control the circuits is a Commodore VIC 20 (the kind you use a TV with for the screen) with I/O hardware I designed and made, and a custom written BASIC program. The guitar used is a cheap acoustic with a pickup attached and whose signal was modified by a number of guitar effects pedals. These pedals were also used to some extent for the vocals.
And lastly, there was no multi-track tape recorder used. The multiple tracks of these songs were painstakingly dubbed between two stereo tape decks while being mixed with the additional instruments and vocals using a specially designed stereo mixer that I made.
