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Last week I submitted subscribers to Säx, a collection of saxophone quartet pieces I wrote and recorded way back in 2004 in a buddy’s attic studio.  In digging around in the vast depths of my backup hard drive, I found quite a few compositions I believed were lost to time (and/or to a 32-bit operating system; my ancient version of Cakewalk 3.0 won’t run on modern, 64-bit operating systems).

Eventually, I’m going to re-release Säx and release these MIDI-based compositions on Bandcamp and on streaming platforms.  I managed to convert the MIDI files to lossless WAVs, and I am doctoring some of them up using Audacity.  Säx will be released in its original form—what paid subscribers could hear in full last week.

For now, I wanted to share some of the tracks from what will be the MIDI release, as well as a recording of one of the pieces I did on a tiny Yamaha keyboard my family has had since I was a small child (and I still have it—I think it works, too).  Paid subs will have access to some other pieces over on SubscribeStar.

The first piece here is “Euroclydon,” named after the Mediterranean storm from the Book of Acts.  I remember learning the name from a sermon at my parents’ church years ago, and I am guessing I composed the bulk of “Euroclydon” around 2012:

“Euroclydon”

The next piece is “Aachen Cathedral Chorale.”  I used this chord progression and melody in a number of pieces, including my organ solo “Organic Evolution.”  I’m sure it’s from some famous Baroque composer, but back in the day, it was one of my favorite themes to incorporate into music.

This version consists of three MIDI files I converted to WAVs and then aligned in Audacity.  I also added some additional reverb and chorus effects.  Essentially, I had the same theme composed for organ, strings, and saxophones, and then mashed them together into this glorious wall of sound:

“Aachen Cathedral Chorale”

This version of “Aachen” was played using the Yamaha keyboard and splicing/aligning all of the parts together.  As I recall, I plugged the keyboard into my older brother’s ancient Crate amplifier, then dangled a primitive computer microphone in front of it and recorded either to Adobe Audition 1.5 or Windows Recorder (the latter would have been a nightmare to line up properly, so I’m thinking it’s the former).  I am playing all of the parts on this one:

“Live at the Aachen Cathedral”

It’s wild to think that I wrote some of these pieces as early 2004 or so.  I found stuff that I likely composed in high school, which would place the absolute earliest possible compositions at 1999.  I was using Cakewalk 3.0 in the eighth grade, so I have some material that would date back to 1998—whoa!

One day I’ll finally figure out how to setup a Windows 95 virtual machine on my desktop so I can run Cakewalk 3.0 natively, but I’ve never had much success doing that.

Regardless, let’s see what else a young Portly cooked up back in the day.

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