Names of my songs or albums do not mean anything whatsoever. Classical composers got it easy: Symphony #3, Sonata #17, Adagio for Strings, etc. It’s totally generic and does not imply any particular subject or literary reference. Coming up with a meaningful name requires a language talent, which I do not have. And the words somehow have to relate to music – this I simply do not know how to do. So I rely on random words generated by Band-in-a-Box program.

Coming up with a project name took a good year of brain twisting. If I was familiar with George Carlin‘s list at the time, I could have picked one of his. It takes a professional to come with something good, you know. So, here it is:

Punk Bands I Have Known

by George Carlin, from the book “Napalm & Silly Putty“

Tower of Swine
Room in My Shorts
Mary Krenwinkle’s Revenge
Sphincter Hoedown
Basket of Fire
Trees for Lunch
Glandular Imbalance
A Fine Way to Die
Let’s Pull Our Eyes Out
Sewer Transaction
Cosmic Groin Pull
Pudding Disease
A Rare Twinkie
Rubber Thoughts
Vaginal Spotting
The Note Fuckers
Puke All Night
Anal Lace
Gorilla Tits
Harmony Sucks
Warts, Waffles and Walter
Mess-Kit Germ Colony
Hideous Infant
Clots on the Move
Systematic Rejection
The Stillborn
Household Pest
Breach of the Peace
Thankless Child
Persistent Rain
Days of Doubt
Sack of Shit
Hole in My Scrotum
Ed, Formerly Don
Cocaine Snot Groove
Hilda Fucks
Waitress Sweat
Infected Mole
This Band Needs Practice

May ’08
Finally, after 4 years of on and off laboring, the “Rainbow Darkly” is out. Certainly, Dave Smith’s Poly Evolver influenced me a lot, you can hear it on more songs here than I care to admit.

Why do I do it? It brings me joy of sorts: the time between the conception and the result is relatively short, and the result is relatively enjoyable. Besides, it’s totally different from my professional activities and this gives me somewhat unusual sense of accomplishment: whatever I do for a living has to be good, otherwise people will not pay for it and I’ll go starving. With music I do not have such a strong stimulus, but it turns out OK regardless. Are you still reading this? Here are more reasons:

• It’s easy.
• It amuses my friends.
• My kids admire my tunes, especially more danceable ones.
• My family does not have to think about birthday, or anniversary, or Christmas presents – I have an inexhaustible wish list of music making software (perpetually upgradeable) and hardware.

This is a copy from the “official” history from the “old site”, i.e., up to “Piano Goo” album. From 2008 or so, please see the blog for updates, announcements, musings, etc.

Dec ’04

“Piano Goo” CD is out. It is as eclectic as everything else I’ve done before, but the general direction is trance. The music is influenced by several technology upgrades: new version of Sonar 3 came with the vSampler, which, it turn, came with a collection of new sounds. And I had a whole year to play with my new Waldorf Q – an amazing piece of German machinery; I feel really sorry that the company went bankrupt.

I also hired an outside help for the first time in my music “career”: Slava Balasanov of Knightly Productions did the mastering and DiskFaktory did the duplication.

For the first time my music was offered for sale to the general public at Amazon, CD Baby, and iTunes (the earlier attempt at now defunct mp3.com does not count).

Mar ’03

“Color of Desire” CD is out. In my humble opinion it’s darker and more electronic than “Pink Lies”.

Mar ’03

Waldorf Q synth is given as a birthday present. I did not touch it until “Color of Desire” was finished.

Jun ’02

“Pink Lies” CD is out. It contains an eclectic collection of tunes in various styles – since I do not make a living doing music, it allows me certain artistic freedom – and they say that money can’t buy happiness!

Aug ’02

The name “Inphal” is created (that’s a whole separate story) and registered as an Internet domain.

’00-’02

I’ve got Cakewalk’s ProAudio sequencer (later renamed Sonar) and re-recorded all the previous material with XV-3080. It all has started to sound real.

Sep ’00

The A-90EX keyboard is bought for kids’ music lessons. It was done against grandparents’ will who desperately wanted a real mini grand. Roland XV-3080 got somehow “attached” to the deal, I don’t remember the gory details.

1996

I’ve bought a Midisoft’s MidiStudio software sequencer from my local software shop and started arranging where the keyboard auto-arranger left off.

1995

It all started when my wife gave me a kiddy’s Yamaha keyboard as the wedding anniversary present.

It sounded kind of thin, but it had an auto-accompaniment feature, i.e., you play a melody with your right hand, chords with the left one, and the box plays like whole band in response. Amazing! So I played some tunes I remembered from my school days and one night I got bored and tried something I had not ever heard before. With the “full band” arrangement done by the keyboard it genuinely surprised me – naturally, it was a pitiful sorry kitsch, but not much worse that Yanni does (nothing personal, man) on a regular basis.

I wrote several more tunes and recorded them on a cassette player. It genuinely spooked my family and friends, but I assured them that I was not quitting my day job.

As a matter of fact, yes, indeed – there is ! I would not take it seriously though.

A lot of people ask me about the nuts and bolts of my method that seemingly allows an engineer (myself) to produce an "artistic" product (the music). I advertise it as a nice hobby and encourage everyone to try. Here is a brief description of how I do it, your mileage may vary:

1. I start with a sound. I can spend hours, days, and weeks (again, I do not do it professionally, so there is no deadline) searching for an inspirational sound, whatever it may mean. The only criterion I’ve got is it should create an "idea of a melody" for me. This is what you hear as lead instrument in most of my songs.
2. Having the sound selected, it is relatively easy to write a melody at the keyboard – the sound leads me to it. The only thing is to record it, so I can reproduce it later. I initially record the melody on piece of paper as best as I can – the rhythmic structure is crude, the tonality is usually A minor, etc.
3. While writing a melody I also try out some harmonies to match. The resulting chord sequence gets recorded on the same piece of paper. At this point, the hardest part of creative work is over – I’ve got a skeleton of a song.
4. I enter the chord sequence in a Band-in-a-Box software. It creates an arrangement for several instruments in a variety of styles based on this sequence. I listen to different styles the software produces until the sequence sounds close to what I have in mind for the song.
5. I record the melody while the Band-in-a-Box plays the arrangement. The great thing for musically impaired like myself is that the software can play in any tempo you want – it’s really important for the melodies that I cannot possibly play fast (it means almost all of them). In 90% of the cases this is the last time I touch the keyboard.
6. I instruct the Band-in-a-Box to produce a couple of choruses of improvisation – it sometimes can be used in a real song despite its totally soul-less origin. Band-in-a-Box can also harmonize the melody in several ways, which is also can be used in the final product.
7. I export all the recorded and generated material into a simple MIDI file, that is the file that contains notes’ codes.
8. I load the MIDI file into the real sequencer – Cakewalk’s Sonar. This is when the real fun starts.
9. Sonar can do many things, but first and foremost I re-map all the default instruments of Band-in-the-Box to Roland XV-3080’s. Then I try to reduce the number of voices from 4-6 to 2-3 and re-arrange their parts time-wise. Sometimes I pick a different tonality. Usually 50 to 70% of material accumulated so far is eliminated at this step.
10. I add some Acid’s loops for decoration.
11. I play with various sound effects, arpeggiators, and software synthesizers to get a more or less cohesive song out of this mess. I might compose and record a couple of new choruses on the keyboard, mostly for variety sake.
12. The final stage – recording. It’s somewhat more involving process than it should be, but this is when it all comes together. There is about a 40% chance that I will not like the result and will have to repeat the whole exercise from one of the previous steps. Or abandon the song altogether – it keeps down the amount of obvious crap.
13. I apply final effects and equalization, so it would sound good on a regular stereo.
14. The rest is a matter of arranging songs on CD and burning them.

That’s it! On the "Hardware" and "Software" pages I describe most of the components of my "studio" and what they do.

q-categories.ins

This is Cakewalk’s Instrument Definition file for a Waldorf Q series synth. The difference is that sound numbers are replaced with their respective categories, i.e., instead of "A002 Rain" it is "pad Rain". So now when you need to choose a pad, you can type "pad" in the Sonar’s instrument selection box and see all sounds in this category. In other words, if you need a lead, for example, you don’t need to remember that "Trennkost" is a lead as opposed to, say, pad or bass. Makes life a lot easier.

The file is based on an original version by Fredrik Haglund posted on Waldorf’s site (I hope he does not mind – let me know if it is not so).

Roland-XV-3080-categories.ins

This is Cakewalk’s Instrument Definition file for a Roland XV-3080 synth. It is the same idea as with Waldorf Q – all patches’ names are prefixed with their respective categories, for example, ‘spd’ for soft pads, ‘hld’ for hard leads, and so on. Since XV-3080 is a general purpose box, it has a lot more categories than Q does.

Portions of this file were copied over from the instrument definition file collection prepared by Li’l Chips Systems.

The Sonar is billed by the manufacturer as a "multitrack digital recording system" which means a sequencer on steroids. It can do both MIDI and loops, and it has a DXi plug-in architecture for expansion. It’s my "everyday" (or more precisely, every-session, I cannot do it every day) arranging and recording environment.

The Band-in-a-Box program compensates for my lack of counterpoint education and ability: it provides auto-accompanement for a given chord progression along with improvisation, harmonization, etc. I usually do not use the result directly, especially drum tracks. But sometimes it produces amazing riffs that I cut and paste unchanged.

The Project5 program is another crutch for the musically impaired – it helps to whip out cool grooves in no time at all. Whatever its shortcomings are – and there are plenty – it is much more fun than any other software in my library. I start it when I have a writers block and this toy usually unstucks me.

The Pentagon I from rgcAudio is an analog modeling DXi software synth that plugs into the Sonar. It has plenty of cool sounds and every knob on the picture has a double function. Unfortunately it eats up a lot of CPU cycles, but it sounds great.

The z3ta+ from rgcAudio is, probably, one of the most potent software synths available. It developed a cult-like following and I am admitting to be a member of this cult. If you are uncertain, that you can write an electronic music, but are willing to try, get this piece of software first. Granted, it will not sound like you – it sounds like its creator René Ceballos, but it will show what is possible!

The DimensionPro from the same guys (i.e., René Ceballos and Cakewalk, whch acquired rgcAudio and René) is another René’s masterpiece! It somewhat less convenient than, say, z3ta+, but its sounds are really, really deep.

poly-evolver.ins

This is Cakewalk’s Instrument Definition file for Poly Evolver from Dave Smith Instruments. It does not have sound categories just yet.

In the absence of real music skills and any ability to play a real music instrument whatsoever (like it is the case with me) the only sound I can produce is the sound of my gear. An this is a critical difference between real musicians and electronic projects like Inphal – the latter do not have their own sounds, they sound like whatever synth boxes they have at the moment. And very often the character of the sound is dictated more by fashion than anything else. This is (fortunately, I hope) not the case with Inphal – I do not care about fashion because I do not have to sell the results my labors. So, I allow my equipment to age gracefully and stick with the gear that proved itself useful.

But, again, there is no such thing as too much gear.

The computer is the heart of it all, but compared to all other hardware it’s nothing look at: gray box is a gray box, not really an eye candy. I assembled it myself from the components. Not a big deal, really.

The TerraTec’s Phase 28 is just a sound card – a device that makes computer to produce sound. The card has a multitude of connections and generally it’s a good value. Unfortunately, the drivers are buggy and the tech support is very, very slow – must be German unionized workforce or something.

This is just a rack-mounted power strip Sampson PS-9. Does not do anything sound-wise despite claims to the contrary by the manufacturer, but adds a lot of convenience – if nothing goes right it’s easy to stop it all, just one button.

This is a very, very convenient "splitter" for MIDI messages – called MIDI interface/patcher in music lingo. Usually one can daisy chain all of the availalbe MIDI gear and configure each box to respond only to its assigned channels (major hassle, believe me – I suffered for full 6 years!). The Edirol UM-880 allows each MIDI device to have all 16 channels for itself. It sounds deceptively simple, but in reality there are good reasons for these beasts to exist.

My secondary MIDI controller is an Axiom 25, whose main advantage is its size – actually, the lack thereof. It fits on my desk and can be easily removed when not needed. It has knobs, buttons, pads – all programmable and very convenient, especially for playing soft synths.