My very first keyboard, which was a gift from my parents, was a Roland. An E36. I still remember reading the manual and dreaming about all the things that I could do. MIDI was the key to my dreams. Patience and practice became the road to my new future.

And then the moment I was waiting for arrived. Finally I was able to play the music I liked listening to. Just one problem... I did not know how to play keyboard.  

I did know how to play the guitar, kinda, but this was something else. It did not hold me back and I forced myself to learn some keyboard. 

At the time, Pentium was launched, and I was able to connect my Roland via MIDI to my fathers computer. As I recall it was a Soundblaster soundcard and I made my first steps into making music by computer. Meanwhile I also got a program called Goldwave. On one hand I was figuring out how to actual play decent music, but at the other hand I was trying to find and use breakbeat. I found a sample of Funky Drummer, by James Brown. It was the sample I was looking for. But due the lack of knowledge,  I could not do much with it than loop the sample. I must have enjoyed it for hours, I am sure.

But I was the proud owner of a Roland keyboard. And it was connected to a computer. Surely I should be able to make those kinds of music myself, or so I thought. 

A cold shower. Before getting the keyboard I did some drumming. I wasn't that good (as an autodidact I just play and learn along the way), but I knew enough to play and compose drumbeats and loops. But it still sounded like MIDI. Not much body in the sounds. And whatever I tried, somehow I was not able to write down the notes that could make the d 'n b I was falling in love with at the time. Or the thunderdome for that matter. My parents did not buy me the keyboard to play those kinds of music. Both of them are lovers of jazz rock music. Music I really like, but is also at a level that was not for beginners. 

Listening to a lot of EDM, I firmly believed there was a shortcut or at least an easy way to create that style of music. Some friends of mine handed me a cassette tape that changed my musical taste forever.  It was fast, but also slow. Energetic, yet, relaed, layed down. It was electronic, joined by accoustic instruments. It was smart, it was intelligent. Intelligent drum and bass. And LTJ Bukem, together with MC Conrad were lighting the sky.  I wanted to do that too. And I knew how to drum, kinda, so I needed a drumkit. With my budget I bought the Roland TD6v. But it was not the drumkit I was used to. It did had great sounds, and if you ever need good cymbal sounds, go for a drummodule from a Roland drumkit I would suggest. Clear, crisp, adjustable and ready to burst.  Even using MIDI I could not drop a drumbeat like Bukem.  And when I did, kinda, I was not able to do it again, and probilly got lucky using some eperimental delay setting somewhere in the chain. Playing those beats live wasn't even an option.  Along the way I bought a DJ controller by Behringer, but it broke not long after that.  I thought maybe miing my MIDI recordings could be a good idea. I forgot about it. 

You know the holidays, getting ready to go places. Travel, drive, or maybe fly to distand constallations. Or not, and stay home, buy myself a new toys, instead of an airplainticket, and spend the hotelmoney on some extra cookies. I choos to call my brother, who was living in Amsterdam at the time and asked him to buy a Juno-D. It was a great keyboard , but came with a error. But the sound was Roland, ready and familiar.  My favorites became the synth presets.  Using other keyboards to play MIDI presets, the Juno-D became the voice, or the ready go chanel 4.

Youtube happend, and I also wanted to get my music out there. It wasn't that good, but I was hoping to find other creative minds. Only one little problem. Youtube did not allowed me to upload just audio.  

Youtube wasn't there for static images. I needed to find footage. Something that could be interesting to watch. And if I were able to use that footage multiple times, that would be a bonus. Maybe some kind of a cartoon. Funny, scaleable. Southpark was not really hard to do if I used Windows Paint. It would be an investment, a project to help me find other people, creative minds who, just like me, were finding out music and MIDI. Worth the time and effort. And then maybe a sportseffent would be handy, because that allowed me to really re-use many images, I was going for the stopmotion idea combining Paint with Windows Moviemaker, more than once. It would be a racesport. That way I could use colors to match different instruments and make the music guide the visuals. 

So a race it was.  A race of cassette tapes. Just a race did not allowed me to say stuff. I knew I needed to say stuf to give the visuals more depths. It also opend the portal to communicate with the viewers. The race should be held in the backyard of the television we were watching who was broadcasting the race. He needed someone op the racetrack and I needed spectaters. Before I knew it, the World of Tapelaps was an idea outgrowing it's purpose. And that meant a lot of work. Way too much to publish on a youtubechanel with zero engagement.  I had fun watching the snippets I made to get an impression.

I learned about proper eq and monitors. I also found out about balanced and unbalanced cables. Being autodidact also has a downside. You don't know what you don't know, so simple things can be overlooked easy. 

Another shower let me feel the flow of the MC707 groovebox. It took some time for me to find a new way to use it, but before that I was able to create music that I enjoyed myself.

TR 808s, the drummachine that should do the trick, the machine that promised to be a vault of sounds of ecstasy. It was, but that was not the fun part.