After moving from Phoenix to The San Francisco Bay area in 1981, I started to accumulate various musical instruments and equipment. I then started recording some songs and playing all of the parts. These were recorded on the multi-track cassette recorder and then mixed down to stereo on the other cassete recorder. A couple of years ago (2013) I decided to try to save these and recorded them into my PC, and then used Adobe Audition to clean up the sound, remove the hiss and background noise etc. and then copy them to CD. I have included a list of the equipment and instruments I used below. This mini studio was all in my apartment. I still have the guitars, but have sold off the rest over the years. Just in case, yes, I did play/sing all of the parts.
The first set of songs I assembled on to a CD named Initiation, as it was my first attempt at recording. Several of the songs were written by a childhood friend I grew up with in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Scott Johnson. Scott and I played a few gigs together while we both lived in Phoenix in the late 70's. I have included links to each song below.
- Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)
- Ain't Too Proud To Beg (The Temptations)
- Allison (Elvis Costello)
- You're Only One, written by Scott Johnson
- No Chains On You, written by Scott Johnson
- Man Without A Heart, written by Scott Johnson
- How Can I Miss You (Dan Hicks)
- Helplessly Hoping (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
- Can You Hear Me, written by Scott Johnson
- Blackbird (Paul McCartney)
- She's Going Out Of My Mind (Jimmy Buffet)
Over the next year or so I did another set of songs. I named this collection Contrasts as the first side contained full instrumentation. The second side was all acoustic, just me and the guitar. This again was a set of classics and favorite songs as well as a couple written by my friend Scott Johnson, who visitied me in the Bay area and sung and performed on them. There is another song by Anselmo Reis who I met shortly after moving to the Bay area. He was playing in band, and was the music teacher at Newark High School as well as an outstanding guitarist. I ended up joing a band with some friends of his and we ended up playing a couple of gigs with both of the bands, and a wedding reception.