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Yamaha PSS​-​480 Demos

by Burnan

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1.
2.
Scheme 05:42
3.
4.
Sepia 03:41
5.
Sad Spider 02:55
6.
7.
3 Cig Dance 10:00
8.
And Gate 07:15
9.
Chanelle 04:34
10.
11.
Daredevil 04:09
12.
13.
14.
Scheme 2 05:57
15.
Redlands 07:48

about

This is a collection of recordings done solely on a Yamaha PSS-480 keyboard. Recordings made between 1992 & 1994.

Effect being, listening on headphones or any stereo it's as if this keyboard is directly connected while me playing it live. No post production. (except Track 13)

These tracks were recorded over time and thus strewn across a plethora of unlabeled cassette tapes. It took quite the effort to compile this collection. Going through my tapes I have a great function on my cassette deck (JVC TD-W318) it can “search” for stuff in the blank spaces. Put the function on fast-forward “play” and if there is any kind of sound or music found it will stop and play it. This function helped tremendously while going through my long periods of silence on tapes. This is how what I recorded back in the day was found. It was my college years at Redlands where I saw a keyboard in an adjacent dorm room, on a shelf under a pile of dust. It was stored high and crooked on the shelf, with its keys peaking at me. I asked the owner if I can borrow it, he let me and I never gave it back. In my mind the keyboard found me. With this keyboard I found a friend. I grabbed it off the shelf and took it home (to my dorm room next door), cleaned it and told myself to grab it tight and never let it go. It was mine. In high school I wanted to be in a drummer. I got a cheap drum set and try as I might could not keep a beat. It was frustrating seeing others do it easily. Some people just were born to keep a beat, not me. Maybe it was for the best but still, if only. But now failing at drums was a distant memory, I now had a contraption that can keep a beat for me, my Yamaha PSS-480.

The Yamaha PSS-480 was a tad outdated even for 1994 being that is was made in 1987 but I didn't know that at the time. Years later I looked up when it was manufactured. I wouldn't care if it was made in 1887 (that would be cooler!) From where I came from musically the Yamaha PSS-480 was a wunderkind. The most advanced piece of tech I ever had. But that wasn't the point of it all. The recordings I had done up to this point was devoid of current technology. I couldn't afford a fancy keyboard anyway. Up to this time my most prized music equipment was tape recorders like the Fostex X-26 (4 track), which was made in 1988. I didn't have the Fostex with me at Redlands, it was broken. (I will say more about the Fostex and tape recorders in other project release notes.) I wasn't trying to keep up with the joneses anyway, If I were to create magic, that magic can be created with anything, so I thought. I wanted pressure, the pressure to create some sort of magic with anything however dated. I had a desire to work in a archaic realm. I wasn't trying to be cutting edge through technology, there were countless others doing that anyway. I thought if using this keyboard was going to make me sound dated then date me. I thought it could in fact make things timeless.

My approach was simple, get as much out of the Yamaha without learning a damn thing musically. I wanted to make amazing things but if you asked me how to play “Mary had a little lamb” I was stuck. I liked that contrast. Basically I wanted to be naive. I wanted to keep my virginity of the Yamaha as long as possible. I came up with theories of approach, a natural process of order and sticking with it none the matter. My not knowing proper notes and structure was therefore an advantage I thought. I knew to keep things simple, preferable in threes. Doing previous noise and experimental recordings you gotta have the minimum of things going on. So just apply those same principals to the keys. I do all this upfront for protection, protection from my lack of talent. Bring in some order, at least apply something regarding rules to help me, then I can build the frame in which to fill in. I couldn't learn drums or guitar etc but I had a keyboard and there is nothing nowhere that says I couldn't push keys and create good things. There is no limits except my own, that is the beauty of art and if I needed to cheat I would. I would make my rules and brake them. To those who have talent well look at me! It was about proving convention wrong. That was my edge.

More than anything the Yamaha PSS-480 helped my mind. It helped me in a trying time. College (Redlands) was such dark times mentally. I just had a hard time connecting with people there. Looking back it’s a wonder I made it out alive, it was that dark of a time. Depression took hold of me, it infiltrated my every cell and stayed there mocking me. I had visions of dark things, a red devil face who talked to me most nights in my slumber and witches jacking me up with massive spells. (There really was witches in Redlands, and they talked to me telepathically and gave me their damn spells. I was a witches bitch.). Dark forces and thoughts, visions pervaded my soul regularly. It was like I was a trapped lab rat being feed the dark arts and not being able to escape. So when I saw the Yamaha, it was a bright spot in this evil muck. I played it ad nauseum. My roommate at the time could contest this fact, I literally slept with it on my chest with it still on. I started to think in patterns, my recording background with the Fostex 4-track helped me learn the concept of multitrack functions on the Yamaha. There was no operating manual or a way to look it up and the guy whom I took it from was quickly expelled from school for reasons unknown. So it was just me and this machine, learning from each other I am sure. There is 5 recording banks to play with, in which I could record unto and thus playback at anytime. One can experiment with the effects and make custom sounds. There was a custom drum function in which I could take a preset drum pattern and add to it. The record banks were limited in time, some longer than others, so I had to learn what those differences were. What you hear on this release is basically “live” recording except for the banks that was recorded beforehand. I was able to layer sounds on top of eachother. My ears got in tune with what was in tune or not. I do have sensitive hearing, so this helped me know what sounded good quickly as far as tones. This was around time of Photoshop newest version 3.0 which was a revolution in graphic design. I recall fellow students in graphic design class jaws practically hit the ground while realizing Photoshop can do layers. I suppose my keyboard was similar. It was like a 4-track but I had immediate access to the tracks and able to play them by hitting the playback button, at anytime I choose. So timing became very important. I would normally experiment around with the custom drum function first, lock in a drum pattern I liked, then create custom sounds. Then it was push keys time and start a refrain and play it over and over eventually composing a song if I was determined. I played and played and played it over, over and over and over. I would get locked into patterns and tones. There was the pitfalls however of the custom banks I recorded being erased if the batteries died or taken out. I did lose some major stuff in this manner which was hard to avoid and irreversible. What is lost is always lost if not saved.

While finding this stuff on my old tapes, I would run into long refrains of me playing the same damn key line over and over. It was horrible, why did I record such things. There is without a doubt way more bad things I recorded with this Yamaha than good, which you will never hear. I did learn discipline. Discipline of being precise on the hitting the keys. The keys on the Yamaha are a tad small so it was easy to hit the wrong key and mess it up. I had to be spot on or it would be a failure and I would have to start the song all over. So thus there is many failed takes on the tapes. It's almost a crime for anyone to hear this collection how it is presented because these tracks are the best of the takes all here in one place to conveniently digest. For me, I had to endure endless monotonous playing and messing up, bad takes, and hearing all the bad stuff in finding the good stuff while archiving. For example on “Like A Sunset” there must be dozens of fuck up versions. When I finally had “Like A Sunset” ready to record, I had to perform it live while recording. The timing had to be right. I was pushing buttons all over the place. All these things nobody else would know or see by just listening to “Like A Sunset”. Also if there was a fade out mostly those were live too, I would either slowly turn down the volume on the Yamaha by hand to fade it out or turn the record level down on the tape deck. Fading out in post production was not possible for me at this time, for me the tape was the last edit. So I had to think of the ending of a song and know what to do at that point, and don’t mess up. Eventually I would nail a version and call it done and that is what is all present on this release. If it sounds like I'm complaining about the process I am not, I wouldn't have done it any other way. I am just explaining what I did. On a note about the archiving process years later. Once I digitized all the tracks I arranged them in a logical order as presented here, not in the order of completion. I do not have such records of the exact dates when a track was completed. Most tapes were unlabeled at the time. I basically cobbed this release for Bandcamp together, it's a compilation of sorts of like minded material. At the time I was not envisioning this release how it came about as a album. At the time I was just in creating mode and making sure I at least get songs recorded on cassette and saved. I was able to save these cassettes through the years while moving etc, and that they all played back fairly well. I still have the original cassettes. During the archiving process I did then label them as to what was on it. For example “Like A Sunset” is now labeled on the cassette it was recorded on originally. Maybe one day some cassettes can be available to the public for purchase. I may make a CDr available as well, so check back here for such things. And if your interested in anything physical ie. original cassettes or CDr then please let me know.

So if anyone is actually reading this, I wonder if any of this backstory is helpful or not. Maybe it's better the listener is completely in the dark about the process. But I know for some people the process is important. If helpful then let me state that I am not a keyboardist, I don’t know music theory. I am not a music student who reads and writes music and can play “Mary Had A little lamb”. I was able to learn to compose these songs with my own will. I created my own music theory. My priority was sounds, tonality and timing. I did sometimes have to do math in my mind and did write things down occasionally. I still to this day don’t know the basics and it's how I like it. There was a strange encounter while in school I had with a fellow student whom I only seen around campus a few times. The University had many music majors and he was one of them. A short walk from my dorm room, I was bored one late evening and decided to sneak into the church for a organ or piano to play. We did not talk just played piano. Just me and him. I guess he was bored as I was as we ended up having a unspoken piano battle. There was multiple pianos and we both chose one far apart from each other in the cathedral style church. He started to play a part after which then I would follow. He was much better than me technically, but I stood my ground and kept it goin back and forth. It proved to me, I was able to hang with the music major and dish out piano stuff while not knowing jack crap. I laughed to myself about it all night.

So this collection “Yamaha PSS-480 Demos” is not a love testament of this instrument. It's not me saying hey I love this machine so much I had to make an album with it to prove I rule at keys. No this collection came out of necessity, a desire and drive to commit myself for better or worse to something foreign to me. To create something out of a dusty unused keyboard and save it. Even though it's done with a Yamaha PSS-480 it's not about it. It could have been any keyboard I found. The story is this machine found me, in my darkest hours and kept my mind intact for this period of time. This is a record of my time there in the dorm, this is what you would have heard if walking by my room. Therefore I thought of this keyboard as something beyond what it was. It found me for a reason. I used it to its limits that I understood and tried to crack its code. I thought insistently of finding its weak point and exposing it. This collection is a testament to the power of proof. These recordings is proof I overcame my own limitations and turned it back onto itself while never asking if it would have been better to just learn piano to begin with. I was so musically challenged taking piano lessons would have be a joke, but I found out was able to play some keys. Later I explored more things this keyboard can do which I cover on “Razor Wire: Music from the hit video game” release. I would also use this keyboard for other projects later on but this collection is just all the stuff I did on the Yamaha by itself as it was hooked up with a RCA cable to a tape deck and me playing it live, that’s it. No overdubbing or multi-tracking except on the machine itself.

So on the surface these tracks may sound primitive, but they were huge accomplishments for me at the time. The trick is to make it sound easy, as if I was some sort of pro. I remember a girl student walking by my dorm room as I had the door open and playing one of these recorded tracks on my stereo and her mouth went agape. I had no confidence in the song (I think is was 3 Cig Dance) as I was too wrapped up in it and judgemental. But she was floored by it. She later said she could never put a song together of anything reaching what I did. (She wasn't a musician) She said not everyone can do such things. So that taught me that yes there is way better musicians way ahead of me in music knowledge and talent, but there was also those musically deficient and way below me, like this girl. That meant something to me as if I had a place, a place I fought for and got to. Even though I was an artist in other media, music to me is the tops, it is the top art form in my view and for me to be considered relevant in the music or sound realm is all that mattered. Still does. Overall I may be overstating things a bit here and explaining too much which goes against one of my rules as to not interfere with what I produce for it must speak for itself. Like how I stood my ground in my grand piano duel in the church, these songs must stand on their own without me there to explain them and without any excuses in the big world of music and if it doesn't stand on its own then I have failed.

As a side note I don't play this keyboard anymore and could never reproduce these tracks on it if I tried. I could never be this good again. At the time I lived with this keyboard, night and day and played it non-stop. I simply don't anymore. Now the keyboard stands in the corner of my room unplayed for many years and probably ready for someone else to take it on as a challenge. Also the sound banks are all deleted because the batteries died. Everything is gone from this era except the tapes and the digital files presented here. Years later (after college) I lost the original keyboard somehow. It was stolen somehow. I ended up finding another one in the classifieds (Recycler, before ebay). So the keyboard I have now is the one I took a picture of and used on the cover art you see above, but its not the actual keyboard used in recording these tracks. Does it matter? No. Just ironic.

When I got all this together at first years ago, I made a CD for myself and put a few songs on Youtube, and then the whole album. I took it down recently. This bandcamp release is only place to find this and at the highest quality files ever available up till now because it's straight from the source.

Burnan, written July 3rd, 2018

Some tracks have more info about them individually.

credits

released June 19, 2018

All Music/Cover Art: Burnan

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Burnan Orange, California

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