I started studying music on my own when I was still a child, around 1985. I played on my mother’s piano, which was at my grandparents’ house, and I was just starting to learn how to program on the MSX computer. I also had an old broken guitar that belonged to my mother and was missing strings, and I would occasionally use it to make my own music. This started to take shape despite having practically no resources.
My mother, tired of hearing me ask for a keyboard as a gift, decided to bring the piano to our house, and I started to play it regularly, even without lessons, and I was increasingly able to learn more about the very limited programming on the MSX. As a child, I never had any material to study at that time, other than the basics of music that I learned at school. My mother was a widow and a keyboard in Brazil was very expensive, far beyond what she could afford to buy for me.
On my birthday in December 1990, my grandmother surprised me by giving me my first keyboard, which I had been asking for for over a year after saving money for it. It was the Yamaha PSS-50, a children’s keyboard, but for me it was a dream come true.
The keyboard was very limited, of course, with a polyphony of only 3 notes, and I tried to compensate by creating other ways to work with it, playing sequences on the MSX and accompanying with it, but this became a problem because I also didn’t have a mixer. To make matters worse, the tempo for adjusting the rhythm on the keyboard and on the MSX were completely incompatible, one was always faster than the other, which made syncing the mix impossible.
I was taking a technical course in electronics and I made my first electronic drum set. The pads were Nescau caps (a type of chocolate milk made by Nestlé in Brazil), and I had a lot of fun playing these drums, but again, there was no way to mix them, much less play both at the same time.
I ended up giving up on recording my songs by mixing the drums with the MSX and my little keyboard, and focusing only on the keyboard, but I still wanted to have the sequences I programmed on the MSX, so that they would have that electronic feel that I always liked.
To solve this, I had one of those old sound systems, which had a microphone input called MIC-MIXING, which was to be used by connecting a microphone, and as you increased the potentiometer, the microphone sound would increase and the music sound would decrease. And that’s how I mixed my songs.
Since this sound system had a double tape deck, I would record my songs live in two takes. In the first take, there would always be the keyboard drums to set the rhythm, and I would usually record with the sequence and/or bass, or with the keyboards.
In the second take, this recording was played on one of the decks, while the mixing of the first take with the second take, which was recorded through the MIC-MIXING, was recorded on the other deck, thus achieving the final result of the song.
Since it was a single potentiometer, there were no independent volume controls, so increasing one side meant lowering the other, which was already low quality and became even worse, and a third take became completely unfeasible because of this loss, which I tried a few times.
I wrote the lyrics in English, mostly because my influences were almost all external, and it was also a way of hiding them, since I was always very shy. Today, reading the lyrics I wrote without knowing almost any English makes me laugh a lot.
I would get together with friends and we would play together for fun in the playground of my building or at my house, and it was really close to inaudible, it was really bad, it seemed like each one was playing a different song. But it was really fun, poor my mother.
Most of my friends abandoned their instruments, or simply went in other directions. So I thought it was better to go it alone than to give up. I continued my studies and each day I felt like I knew more.
By the end of 1992, I had composed about 20 songs and I started recording them in instrumental versions. The demo was called “Side Low” precisely because I thought I was still very bad, and I still needed to improve a lot more. I wrote one of these songs in honor of my grandmother, for believing in me and giving me my first keyboard and encouraging me to play the piano at her house, which were my first steps in music. She unfortunately passed away the day after Christmas Eve in 1992 without ever hearing the song I wrote for her. I never finished recording all the songs and only 10 were recorded. More than 30 years later, I decided to post them on my YouTubechannel.
My mother sold my grandparents’ apartment (my grandfather had already passed away a few years before), and with the money she gave me my first PC, a 386DX40 with 8MB of RAM. With that, I started to study MIDI and Tracked Music and compose my first songs in MODEDIT and soon after in FastTracker II, but I didn’t have a sound card, so I built one myself, which I used until February 1994, when I bought my first sound card on my first trip to DisneyWorld, a Sound Blaster 16.
Because of that, I never used any of the old equipment to make music again, except for the MSX that was sold many years ago. I still have the drums and sound card that I made, and the keyboard today belongs to my son.
In 1994, my mother returned to the United States, this time to fulfill her dream of visiting New York, and brought as a gift my first full-size keyboard, a Yamaha PSR-310, which was still far from being a professional one, but it was another step forward. But she imposed the condition that I should receive private music, harmony and keyboard lessons, and introduced me to her friend Luizinho to give me these lessons. By coincidence and my luck, it was the renowned Professor Luiz Costa Netto, ambassador of MIDI music in Brazil at that time.