Old Recordings- New Life

I love music.

Most of you know that I am an amateur composer and music arranger. There is a link to my music page at the upper right of this blog, and it's there because this blog is related more to my personal adventures in life and my pursuits in writing and editing.

The music side of me needed it's own page :)

I have read recently that old 1980's music groups and hair bands have found new glory and revitalized careers thanks to all of the new music oriented video games that are now available for systems like the PlayStation, X-box, WII, and even the handheld Nintendo DS. These games feature some new songs from contemporary artist, but the remarkable thing is that they include several old guitar standards from bands like Boston and Blue Oyster Cult, and guitar legends like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Hendrix.
All those old song catalogues have been hanging around for a while, growing old like the legends who performed them while they wait for re-issue in some newfangled future format, or to be picked up for Diet Coke commercials.

But then, a new wave of music games comes along and suddenly those old tunes are hot properties; making lots of new money for their old artist.

I'm all about bringing back those songs and introducing them to a new audience. My son Justin now has almost the same recall of 1980's music as I do, except he can actually get through the solos on Guitar Hero on expert, while I strum away on beginner.

Another cool thing about our digital age is that I can take old music that I recorded on cassette tapes back in the 1990's and bring them back to life.

Cassette tapes were okay for their time, but their biggest drawback is that they don't age well. Not well at all.
After I had upgraded all my music to CD's by the late 90's and phased out all my tape players at home; well the old cassettes just ended up in the car where I did have a cassette player. That wasn't a great place to store them. The Texas heat scorched and degraded them even further than the standard loss of magnetic quality they experience over time.

However, I just managed to convert some of those songs over to a new digital format. Some of them fared better than others and sound great, but others suffer from horrible tape hiss that I cannot completely eliminate because the source was already too far gone.

But I'm finding a revival of my own material very satisfying - thank you very much.

As I sit here enjoying my creative projects from nearly a decade ago, I wonder if somewhere Eric Clapton or Thom Scholz is picking their way through Guitar Hero and wondering how they ever managed to nail those solos at a live gig with all the smoke, amplifier noise, screaming fans, and all that hair.

All of it is long gone for us now- especially the hair.

(To hear the selections from my pre-digital recording past, click the link at the top of my page to visit my MAGIX Music files. They are all MP3 files that were added on Dec 8th.)

Gary