soledad penadés

I just logged to Schism Tracker forum some days ago to report a problem with the CVS version and noticed that Xenon, the spanish musician which I have always seen at BCN party, was also registered in the forum and contributing to Schism with a port to BeOs (or that I understood).

Then I looked at his signature in the forum: "10 years of tracking!".

"Ok" I thought, "10 years! he must have started really early". Then I realized it's going to be 10 years since I did my first tests in Scream Tracker very soon. I can't remember exactly when was the day, but it was something around the end of May and beginning of June of 1996.

Ahhh!... nostalgia arises, those were the times. Just hours and hours spent in front of the pc, with a pair of cheap headphones (even more, the left one was a bit fucked up and the bass sounded distorted). While the other girls were busy trying to flirt with the (so called) most handsome guy in the class, I was trying to find a decent way of saving my songs to a tape and then being able to listen to them anywhere, everywhere. Tracking in mono and listening later in Cubic player (as that one supported stereo). Creating a little library of samples, ripped from modules from the pcmania cd (later on, I discovered that most of these samples really came from lots of amiga and pc demoscene musicians, such as falcon, purple motion, jester...). Exchanging messages between more people in the samples messages... That was funny.

Then the superprofessional people entered the scene. People started recording their songs with real labels, thus getting serious with the sound quality. Not only they were worrying about their songs, but they also criticised every other song which didn't sound good. If it hadn't been professionally masterised, it sucked. No matter the melodies. It sucked.

At the beginning I just didn't give a fuck about that. Who cares, I'm not studying for being a musician, I'm not going to earn a single penny with music, I just want to have fun with this. Then I somehow became serious about that, I tried to understand cubase and all that, but it was quite impossible to do anything without a midi keyboard and the computer I had (a pentium II) wasn't able to cope with soft synths. So that and the fact that the demoscene musical scene was as annoying as it always is for newcomers, made me quit the music for a while. I didn't do anything for almost two years.

Then I rediscovered demoscene and did some more songs, learned new styles and techniques: chiptunes, how SID works (even if I never finished a song, but I had several attempts in goattracker), listened to and understood md, dune, and all that kind of intelligent dance music tunes, etc... I also started playing a bit with Reason, with the new laptop I got, but...

...I really don't feel comfortable or inspired. I have the feeling that I have already made all what I had to do, and any new song I do sounds to me like my previous songs. I think I'd better celebrate the 10 years with a good pause. Or do you have any suggestion for these moments of mental vacuum? :D