TRUMAN KEESEY - Intelligent Dance Music (IDM)
[Listen]
[Home]
Click on the image below to buy clothing, mugs, gifts, toys, mousepads, and more, having that image on them.
How I Started Producing Electronic Music
I
tried again and again to form a band in Frostburg, Maryland. At the same
time, God was finding ways of telling to me over and over again that He
intended me to perform alone.
I discovered that I could not draw sizable audiences with merely my
singing and acoustic accompaniment. Maybe I could, but I gave up trying.
A Frostburg State University student named Jerry went into a partial
trance upon hearing of my difficulties in forming a band, and he said
that I should obtain an electronic drum machine. I recognized this as
being a message from God.
It was the idea of Dan Merrill for me to purchase a Korg Electribe-M
groove box to use as my backup band.
Dan is a fanatic who lives and breathes electronic music. His life's
time is devoted to that medium, both listening, cooperating with others,
such as myself, and producing his own and other people's electronic
music.
I had previously tried to recruit him and his electronic equipment to
accompany me on stage, and we rehearsed several times with his groove
box and sampler. It went verily well, but nothing came of it, except
that he convinced me to purchase my own groove box instead of going
onstage with him.
In between times, before I was able to purchase a groove box, another
FSU student from Cumberland, Maryland, by the name of Jason Crawford
recorded accompaniments for me onto cassette tape, using his Roland
electronic keyboard and drum machine.
I gave several free impromptu (unannounced, unpublicized) performances
at a local bar, using those backgrounds recorded by Jason Crawford. They
were well liked by the few hearers who happened to show up during those
performances.
Eventually I saved the money and bought the Electribe. I had spent
decades conceiving of arrangements that I would do whenever I would get
the means to generate multiple tracks. Thus I have, waiting to be
produced, about 40 albums that will employ the electribe groove box. Dan
Merrill offered to capture (into computer) the tunes from the groove
box, and to record my singing and guitar playing along with them, and to
master them, using his sophisticated equipment. We started doing this
slowly. In the meantime, I made some cassettes of the accompaniments and
lent them to people. Those people played the cassettes for their
friends, and everybody said they wanted to buy the cd's when they would
be available.
So I asked Dan to go ahead and burn one with the only few numbers we had
done so far, just to fill that demand as soon as possible, and we could
finish the album later.
Meanwhile, I recorded almost all of the instrumentals and
song-accompaniments stored in the memory of the groove box, into a
second cd,
"WAY
OUT THERE"