My old compositions
In this post, I am going to share some of my initial compositions. These compositions are all instrumental and most of these are around 10 years old. This was done in my early days when I was learning music through books and fiddling with a small keyboard. I knew very little about things like bass and chords. In fact if you notice, some songs won't contain any bass or contain very little bass, same goes for chords. So the compositions will be quite immature.
My interest in music started during the college (13 years ago). My first computer based tool to sequence music was a qbasic program using the Play command. Then I got interested in keyboard seeing my college mate Ranjesh play the keyboard. During the 2nd year of college, I got myself my first keyboard - a small one - Casio SA 21. I still have it. I used to read some carnatic books on various ragas and try to play it on keyboard. I was even surfing the net reading about the various ragas. Film songs set in different ragas interested me. My mother, who can identify ragas, helped me further. She also helped correct the wrong notes that I played on the keyboard. Another college friend of mine, Venkat Sundar, a guitarist taught me some basics of chords and that kindled my interest further. Then my good friend, Vasanth, got a computer in his hostel room and there was this Noteworthy express software that he got along with it. I used to hang in around his computer trying to compose on it. Then, he got Cakewalk Express software CD and that was even better. I was hooked to it and all of these tunes were composed in that. All these songs were sequenced as MIDI files using Cakewalk Express software. And they were mostly played via the default MIDI output of "Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth". I either entered the notes directly or played it on the normal computer keyboard used for typing.
I have posted 20 tracks here and all these instrumental pieces are about 1 minute or 2 minutes. You can listen the songs from the box below. You can hover your mouse over the file name or the player to read the description of the song. Names given are very random. They are an after thought. Most of the songs weren't composed with the given name in mind. Kindly listen to them and leave your comments here.
A couple of years after passing out of college, I got myself a Yamaha PSR 350 keyboard. Then there was this music band being formed in my office and I was somehow part of the band. Playing all those film songs (especially Ilaiyaraaja's) taught me a whole lot of things about music. And of course, am still learning. No one can learn music fully.
