Tech creep and the death of history, part 1: the hp pavilion desktop
posted on 21 Mar 2014 under category History
On April 8, 2014, Microsoft ends support for Windows XP. This sad fact has killed a big chunk of my musical history.
It’s not that this hasn’t happened before, of course. I’m just noticing it now because it’s happening now, but once I get all of the refinements on my new studio PC (which is largely still my OLD PC, just with a new OS and some more memory) I’ll have to deal with the updates and translations that I’ve done when I’ve upgraded machines in the past, and then deal with the files and archives that will not translate. Being a natural packrat, and someone who likes thumbing through all of those old things that are road markers for my past, it makes me sad that some things will now only exist in my memory or in the stories I tell here.
When I finally quit my last bands to go solo in 1996 I was still operating in the mindset of what home studios were at the time. I suppose there was the odd very rich person who could afford a computer-based studio, but for the most part when you heard ‘home studio’ you thought drum machine, a few mics, and a 4-track or 8-track tape machine. I thought that was the way I’d go as well, and so I was looking into various pieces of equipment that would have cost me $200-$300 or so each at the time. Also, having seen drum machines and their horrible user interfaces, I wasn’t looking forward to programming some of the drum things I was writing in my head. Somehow I got the bright idea (probably by looking at the back of my computer and seeing a ‘MIDI port’) that I could use some kind of computer software to program sequences and then plug into a drum machine to make the sounds.
This was right after I got married, and a few months after we did we got our first family computer - a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion desktop with a blazing-fast Pentium 166 chip inside. It was not that far off from the one in the upper left of the pic here, actually. That old thing ran Windows 95. I remember having to get the floppy drive replaced - an actual service call to a tech who came out and opened it up and did it himself. When I saw how easy it was to open those things and swap parts I decided to do future maintenance myself - which came in handy pretty quickly, as it turned out.
I searched various software stores (remember those?) looking for MIDI programming applications and found some place online who made a nice, simple little thing called Drumz Wizard. It programmed MIDI through a simplified, dumbed-down user interface that made it not feel like you were programming MIDI. You set tempo and beats per bar, then created a pattern of ‘x’ bars, then used your mouse to fill in colored blocks for each drum on a grid - drums/cymbals on the Y axis, beat subdivisions on the X. Then you used a song builder to connect your patterns end-to-end to create full songs, which you could then export as MIDI files. “Great,” I thought, “now all I have to do is find a drum machine and 4-track” - which meant finding about $500 or so in our newlywed budget while also trying to save for a house (and after a few months a new car).
In the meantime I tried hacking around, seeing if I could pseudo-multitrack by piping my audio out and plugging my guitar into a Y-cable and recording onto our stereo tape deck. This was early to mid 1997, so I had been writing songs with my old high school friend and drummer Paul in Savannah - every few months we’d get together and boombox-tape us playing through whatever I’d written and some pisstake covers. I was also getting into black metal at the time, and was figuring out riffs here and there. I remember trying to do some layered-guitar recording of an early version of Wanderlust, and I did manage to get a single-guitar-and-drums version of Mayhem’s “Deathcrush” on tape. Those tapes are long-gone now, and sounded pretty bad anyway, but it just underscored my need for that studio setup, and that $500 price tag loomed larger and larger as I wrote more and more music with no way to get it recorded.
Until my wife saw a tech catalog that was getting passed around her office, that is. She brought it home and said, “You know all that money you want to spend on a 4-track? Why wouldn’t this work? It’s cheaper.” She had marked a program on one of the pages named Magix Music Studio. “Turn your home computer into a complete recording studio!” read the bold boast beside the picture. At something like $40 it was cheaper, but in reading the fine print it said it required a ‘full duplex soundcard’. At the time I didn’t know what that meant, but I did some reading online and found out the built-in soundcard on my computer didn’t qualify. The “Sound Blaster AWE 64” a few pages earlier in the same catalog did, though, and at only about $60 it certainly fit the budget. A couple of weeks later I had my stuff, and I got to work installing software and hardware.
It’s the decay of years that prevents me from remembering completely the order of things, but I’m pretty sure this was early 1998. I know for sure that I didn’t start recording in earnest until May 1998 (the earliest date listed in the recording window for the first Rampage EP), and I know we moved from our crappy apartment into our first house (a.k.a. the first Bloody Leg Studios) in March 1998. I don’t know if I did any preliminary recordings in the old apartment, but I don’t think so. Anyway, once the house (and consequently the studio room) and PC and software were set up I didn’t waste any time getting the songs set, planning, and then recording that first EP. The computer worked well enough - horribly, in retrospect, but at the time it was amazing just being able to multitrack guitars. I’ll go into the horrible details of home recording in the days before DirectX and straight-wave exports later. But, suffice it to say that I knocked that first EP out in short order.
And then I had the problem of how to do the next album - on a computer whose hard drive was completely full.
It may be hard to remember, and like the Four Yorkshire Men if I tell the kids today they’d never believe me, but there was a time before CD burners and USB drives, and backing up mass amounts of data was a Herculean task, only undertaken by the most brave who had some means figured out, the necessary equipment, and the fortitude to persevere knowing that all they hoped to save may be lost anyway. Anyone remember the ZIP drive? The Jaz Drive? These are the days I was talking about. The now-long-lost avenue I tried was the Sparq drive. And, long story short, about $200 and a year later I lost the master tapes to everything I’d ever done from that first EP up through Cummin Atcha Live. Not the first mass data or musical loss I’ve suffered, and not the last either. Oh well - such is life.
Anyway, that first Pavilion computer served me pretty well. Going back, what I recorded on it was:
I also did my half of the Hellhammer tribute and the Festering Sore “Chlorine…” album in that old house, but based on the drums used I think I had my second PC by that time. That, of course, would be the next part of the story…
(I’m completing my blog migration in September 2014, when I’m writing these italicized appendices to blog posts, so by date you can see we’re into the ‘near history’ phase, or ‘recent past’, or whatever other oxymoron you want to use. In fact, I’m writing this exactly six months to the day from this original post.
As such, I don’t really have any hindsight-based insights into what’s written here. I’m just glad I documented my past in older blog posts so well, because that’s how I pieced together most of what is here. So, good on ya, younger Vic - from your older self.
“Remember the trash can…”)