Just a reminder that everything is still 90% off with promo code moving at my Bandcamp page.
While packing up for the big move I found quite a few fun little items and mementos: old notebooks from my childhood; photographs with friends in our doughy youths; doodles from former students who now likely have families of their own; bits of music I’d composed. One of the coolest finds was my old Yamaha PortaSound PSS-50:
This little keyboard has been in my family for as long as I can remember. I’m certain it was my older brother‘s keyboard, but through years of use it became “mine” in that way that childhood items do among siblings. The keyboard is likely just a few years younger than me, which would mean it’s been around for nearly four decades.
And it still works—well, mostly. The keys from the first F through the first D no longer play, but every key from Eb up to that third C work beautifully. It runs on six AA batteries, which I apparently changed out recently, because I was jamming on this little puppy before packing it.
In my early, lo-fi-because-I-didn’t-know-any-better days, I recorded quite a few pieces with this PSS-50 plugged into my brother’s Crate guitar amp with an old computer microphone dangling in front of the amp’s horn (I’m going to release those recordings one day). In the super early days, I’d record separate WAV files using Sound Recorder, then combine them using the same software, hoping everything lined up properly; Adobe Audition 1.5 smoothed that over for me, though.
I still remember some of the classic voices on this keyboard: “26” cues up an “Electric Guitar” sound which has this amazing distortion to it while still sounding clean enough to use melodically. The default “00” is a “Trumpet” that, to me, is the standard sound any synthesizer should have. Indeed, there is a more robust Yamaha synth from this era that someone donated to the school years ago, and “Brass 1” is the default voice when starting the keyboard.
That yellow “Demo” button played an instrumental version of the song “Venus.” My older brother changed the lyrics to “Booty, Booty, Booty, Come Home,” which he said was the theme song for my band, which he initially named “Booty and the Bootettes” before changing it to “Booty and the Flaming Booties.”
As you can see, dear reader, this keyboard and I share a lot of history together. If it ever stops playing entirely, I’m going to have to write to Yamaha to repair it. They’ll probably have to bring their last remaining 1980s consumer mini-keyboard specialist out of retirement/cryogenic freezing to do so, but I want this little guy handed down to (God Willing) my little guys!
So it was that I picked ol’ PSS-50 up and improvised a little hornpipe using “17”—“Reed Organ”:
