The Phantom Band

The Demo Tape

Sorry about the clicking sounds: it didn't rip very well. The original is 100% digital but I lost it, so this is a rip of a CD of a cassette tape recorded from a 1995 PC soundcard. Retro, huh?

The History

It was the summer of 1995 and I had just graduated from University. After spending two months of the summer travelling around Europe in a van - seven chainsmoking friends in one 20 year old minivan designed for a family of four - I still wasn't ready for real work. We were listening to Goldie, the Chemical Brothers, Orbital.. and I wanted to be a rock star too - preferably anonymous, popular and rich. Unfortunately, I couldn't really play any instruments. Fortunately, my friend Greg could play the piano very well and was gullible enough to believe that we didn't need any musical equipment: just a midi keyboard and me.

So once we were back in England, I sat down to write the software. The original plan was to meet a month later to give me time to code the first version - I was literally starting from scratch. In October we moved to Manchester and a little later than planned, I finally had something that kind of worked so we started writing the music too. The only thing was, while I was writing the program Greg couldn't use it since we only had one computer. And we didn't have any money. And by then we had accidentally moved into a particularly unwelcoming part of North England. And for some reason, our body clocks had shifted round so that we got up at 3pm and went to bed at 8am. And we didn't know it but the Sound Blaster sound card was broken and would sporadically require a reboot.

It was a very dark beginning to the Phantom Band, and that's when "The Sky Is Falling" was written: it took three months to write the first song (and the software..). After some pretty serious run-ins with the local gangs we moved back to Holloway, London in January 1996, for relative safety and more dole money.

By then the software was a lot more stable, so I was happier, and Greg could spend more time using it, so he was happier too. We carried on writing music and I continued writing code. Although we were pretty poor and it was always cold, life wasn't bad. We were in the middle of writing a nice melodic song when we heard the terrible news that Conrad - a fellow traveller and a truly wonderful guy - had died in surgery on March 15th, 1996 (the Ides Of March).

As time moved on into the summer, our bedsit in Holloway was starting to feel very small. We were now very seriously broke and often reduced to choosing between cigarettes or food (we chose B & H, when we could afford them). All our backup money had long gone and it was make or break time. We finished one more song, recorded 10 copies of the demo tape and passed them out to the unsuspecting world.

Two uneventful months later we hadn't heard anything and I basically gave up. I decided that I was sick of being broke and found a job writing radio network planning software. I never wrote any more music, although Greg did in a rock band. That band doesn't exist any more but they were a lot of fun to go and see live, plus I could pretend to be a musician to impress the ladies.

The Technology

In 1995 I bought the best computer I could: a 100 MHz Pentium Pro with 8MB of memory and something like a 512MB hard-drive. No gigabyte mp3 players then - in fact no mp3s at all then. I wrote the software from scratch using C++ running on Linux. We had a Yamaha DX7, a minimoog, a microphone and nothing else. The computer could also dual boot into Windows 3.1 - which had a program for directly editing WAV files. I used that to slice up the drum loops and other samples, and also managed to use it to remove clicks and pops from our sounds. Most of our samples came from Greg's record collection.

I started after we finished our Europe trip: September 1995. I didn't know about version control so anytime I made a mistake coding I was stuck with it until I could fix it (no rolling back to the last version). I didn't know it the time but my soundcard - a SoundBlaster dual midi and sampler card - was broken and would randomly crash when recording and playing back samples at the same time. I spent the first four frustrating months trying to find out what was wrong (I couldn't afford a new soundcard). Was it my coding, was it Linux?..

The first version was ready by about October/November. There wasn't much: a sequencer, a sampler, pluggable effects. Gradually I added new types of "keyboard": algorithmically generated as well as sampled. I added new FX, and added more midi controls (the DX7 had some sliders on the left side which were useful). In the end it was a pretty functional piece of software. I should have released it under the GPL but never quite got around to it, until it was too late and other people had gotten around to writing similar stuff, about two or three years later.

Much of the workflow we needed then isn't necessary anymore because computers are 40 times faster and have 1000 times as much memory and disk space. Nice.