Only a Downstat

The weird, cobbled-together page where Pierre makes available his original music and that of relatives. This page is under constant construction. Some music is accessed by external links only.

The important sections are Gary Numan Spoofs as well as Other Musical Links that may possibly enrich your life.

NEW! (July 21, 2007): I still have no decent music keyboard, but made a mix with the "Brain Freeze Music Mixer" which is part of the "Cool Content" for a site for a 7-11 "Simpson's" contest. A very silly site, and the mixer's limited to 90 seconds, but check out my tune "Cosmic Flanders" at the bottom.

NEW! (August 14, 2003): There won't be any new songs for a while, my apartment got broken into and they took everything, including my beloved music keyboard. Damn! Here are details of the theft of the keyboard.

I take a liking to rearranging music in unexpected keyboard auto-rhythms that dare not speak their name. For openers, I'm respectfully lampooning the music of Gary Numan. I'm particularly tickled by the kletzmer version of "Metal" I whipped up -- has Gary gone Jewish? I'm also pleased with Drac Gets Funky, a funk-rap about dragons (yes, that's my voice).

Have a listen to the Gary Numan Spoofs and the regular stuff, and let me know what you think, in a public guestbook or by private E-mail:

Wahoo! In 2002 I got a Yamaha PSR-350 keyboard (no longer sold, resembled the PSR-450 without a pitch-shifter lever) and also the Cubasis VST 3.0 music editing software (a product from Steinberg, no longer supported). I first recorded MIDIs but then as I learned about Cubasis I made MP3's of the real keyboard sound! All but the first two songs were edited with Cubasis.

I am Canadian but lived in France for 2 years as a toddler, where at some point I must have heard French accordion music. I learned to play this on the keyboard with its auto-rhythm, auto-intro, auto-ending and auto-duet harmony. Isn't technology wonderful? Then I found out the piece is called "Le Ciel Gris de Paris". The MIDI sounds great with the keyboard sounds, but hideous in the average computer. This MIDI was produced solely with the recording features of the keyboard, no editing afterwards. Later, I made an MP3 of the real keyboard audio, but this file takes longer to download.

Frankie Yankovic played traditional polka music. (He was no relation to Weird Al Yankovic, it turns out, although his polka was an inspiration to Weird Al to take up the accordion.) One song "My Girlfriend Julaydah" included the line "When I am busted, she is disgusted," which sums up a lot of relationships. Anyway, my rough attempt at performing the tune (unedited). I mistakenly called it the "Delilah Polka" before.

Here are some recordings from the demonstration songs of the Yamaha PSR-350 keyboard. They are automatic, I had nothing to do with playing them, and it shows the full richness of sound capabilities of this keyboard. NOTE: the PSR-350 and lower models don't actually have a pitch-bend knob, so bent pitches (slides) that you hear were put there using MIDI and XG code-editing, not from the keyboard's own controls. But the keyboard can play back many code effects it doesn't produce itself.

Yamaha is paying me big bux to tell you that a Yamaha portable keyboard is an excellent addition to your family room or basement den with the fake pine panelling. Plays easily, sounds great, kids can learn music from it and they think it's cool...Warning! Overuse of a keyboard or synth can give you an uncontrollable urge to appear under hot stage-lights wearing a black shirt and make-up like Kraftwerk -- at which point you won't care.

The Mission Impossible theme is a particularly good thing for a science demonstration of the physics of sound waves. When played with Windows Media Player, using the "Scope" visualization (a crude sound oscilloscope), the flute part looks like a pure sine wave standing out from the lower-frequency instruments, the trumpets produce triangular waves, and the percussion, particularly the cymbals, create jagged noise.

Wahoo! I had this bouncy tune rattling around in my head for years, and now I've finally worked it out of my head and into the Real World for people to hear. I'm going to add some vocals about a polluted future world where this guy is nevertheless glad to be going on a beach vacation to a polluted beach with frying UV waves and stuff. Talk about lowered expectations! This is a completely original tune, as far as I know, and it might even end up having a Message.

And how about this for a quick and dirty number? The Partridge Family's "I Think I Love You" -- as a tango? Hey, I don't MEAN to do hokey accordion numbers. It's in my blood, like when the Leningrad Cowboys are fated to produce the cheesy music they produce, although they have great suits and snazzy hair-do's when they do so...

Dragons with Afros? This next one takes some explaining. Since 1988 on the old pre-Internet Bulletin Board Systems of Toronto my main computer alias has been Draconian, the Purple Dragon of Cyberspace. My smiley-face: >8===:) Draconian is logical, unemotional, vicious, and for him I developed a large fictional back-story. Since the Cubasis VST 3.0 has an audio sample library, I decided to get fung-kay and add a voice-over. Draconian does a 1970's funk-rap about dragons. This number's got ATTITUDE!

There's nothing like the thrill of seeing a piece of music come together with hard-won effort -- but if you're too lazy for that, have some fun slapping a beat-box mix together! GrooveBlender 2 , a Shockwave "game", has sampled loops which appear like building blocks on your screen. String some together and create a rhythmic mix in one of 3 styles: Hip Hop, Funk or Electronica. You can even do a simple mix and ask the program to lengthen and complexify it based on a random patterning of your pattern choices ("blending"). It makes outputs to Windows Media Player audio files. I offer here some quick-and-dirties: "Funky Constipation" and "Quantum Beat". NEW EXTRA ONE: "Electro Sickness". Sadly, I did these when GrooveBlender 2 was offered as stand-alone shareware. Now it is limited to on-line Web-based use, and the number of samples appears to be stripped down. But give it a try anyway.

I also have another mix called "Drac's Intruder Mix" which used an old mix program called Beat 2000 and added a keyboard line from me. The sample there is, of course, from the movie TRON (1982), which 20 years later is still a fanciful Disney movie about a computer geek who assists a revolution for the tiny inhabitants of a computer.

Here's a Techno number, Magic Hour. It was played in real time on the keyboard and it shows. The little timing mistakes could be fixed later in "post". Will I ever turn my RAW songs into polished products? I was playing with the Yamaha on-board reverb and DSP choices to make interesting stereo delay echoes for a Purple Organ and a Steel Drum sound. The title is a key phrase from the movie REIGN OF FIRE.

Well, after years without a music keyboard there is nothing new going on, except that I recently went to a web-page for a 7-11/Simpsons contest. To fill up their page with stuff to interest people they included a section for "Cool Content" and if you click that, one of the things you can play with on-line is the "Brain Freeze Music Mixer". It's limited to 90 seconds or so. So I tried to record a piece I call, "Cosmic Flanders", it got slightly cut off at the end: