…or, what’s left of it.
During my early to mid-20s (which would be the mid- to late-‘90s) while I was in bible college and doing worship music in churches, I used the inspiration from it to work on my own music with a basic PC running Cakewalk, an off-the-shelf off-brand wavetable sound card, and a beat-up Akai X-7000 sampling keyboard that I used as a MIDI controller (remember Quick Disks?). When I was at Faith Community I used this in combination with the church’s Yamaha DX-7 II-D and layered sounds together to create sounds and did a lot of rearranging of hymns and things because at the time I couldn’t (and still can’t) read sheet music, needed chords, and the hymnal didn’t include them so I learned by ear.
In any event, once I got married in 1998, my creative output went down to a trickle; and by the time we moved to Florida in 2000; I was no longer actively creating anything, and the Akai ultimately went to charity. I did two more tracks after the divorce in 2008 (neither of which exist in any form now), and that was about it.
These days, I have my Mac machines, a Yamaha PSR-EW400 portable workstation and a pair of guitars (neither of which I can play with any skill now), and from time to time I tinker around a bit; but as I’m not doing anything musically in or for the church anymore, there hasn’t been any inspiration to pick it up again more seriously.
What follows is a selection of the work I did in the mid-‘90s with that old PC/wavetable setup, with the approximate years that I made them. Most of them are in a “new age” style that was the rage at the time with the likes of Yanni and Enya burning up the music charts, with one or two pop or ballad attempts along the way.
The tracks are not professionally mastered—just recorded digitally from the audio card output as I played it back in Cakewalk to raw PCM and burned to a couple of CD-Rs decades ago, and now converted to AAC/MP4. The links in the song title will download the .mp4 file, or you can just play them back with the individual players (make sure to stop one before starting another).
Come Away Again (1994)
Be Thou My Vision (1994)
Last Lullaby (1996, around the time my mother passed)
When I Fall (1994)
Holding an Angel (1994. This one actually did see some sunshine beyond my own site; I gave permission for it to be adapted as a wedding song.)
A Walk on the Ocean (1994)
Rain & Candlelight (1996)
If Dreams Come True (1996)
Love’s Refrain (1996. This was adapted a couple of years later for my own wedding in 2008 but ultimately not used (the mother-in-law didn’t like it.)