RECORDING NOTE:

This is one of the few "garage" pieces that had electronic sounds. The "brass" tracks were generated on the Fairlight, an Australian device that was the world's first commercially-successful computerized instrument sampler. In today's inflated currency, Fairlight cost the equivalent of about a half-million dollars and filled a whole room (and no, I didn't own one; this was recorded in a studio-for-hire), but its old microprocessor wiring (probably better described as "macroprocessor" wiring), nowadays, could probably fit into a wrist watch, or at the very least, into something as small as an iPhone.

Everything, i.e., the brass as well as the physical instruments, was recorded to 8-track audio tape, and all the orchestral sounds had to be squeezed onto a single track. The mix is therefore suboptimal, and I had to decide whether I should re-score it now, since current multi-track digital recording systems readily allow each sound to be isolated to its own individual track for mixing purposes. After long deliberation, however, I decided to leave the old Fairlight track. If it was good then, how is it not good now? Besides, I don't want to rewrite history; neither my own nor anybody else's.

Had I had the money back then, I would have hired live musicians for all my recordings. If I had the money now, I'd still hire live musicians for my recordings. Sorry, Local 802. Who knows; perhaps this will be the year that such a thing actually comes to pass.

© 2012