William Osborne Bisset

Well, just a book about me so bare with! 😛 Please excuse my enthusiasm and the paragraph barf lol. I have to continuously proofread this mind diarrea! hahah! - lol

Let's jump into it for the time being.... I love to dabble in a lot of things... Hahah! These days, alongside my 9-5 of cleaning for a living, I love to create! When I was a wee boy I would mess around our upright piano in the living room and record my experimentations. I did not have a clue how to play. I was playing by ear, learning notes and chords. I don't have any of those known recordings to date that I know of.... Bummer! Every now and then something interesting would come of my "hammering" the keys! My mother knew how to play the piano and is where I may have that interest and imparted talent. Today I am still quite a bit handicapped on learning what keys are what but I get the gist! When I was not messing around on the piano annoying my mom or pop I drew at the living room table! I should note, my parents did inspire these patterns. Every time my dad would doodle I would too! Hand in hand, he helped drive this interest in drawing, since I loved cartoons! Another thing was this insatiable interest in wanting to know what wa inside every darn thing! Covered devices were no match for a screwdriver! Eventually I tore my first thing apart, A TAPE RECORDER! It was not mine but my mom's witch quit working. I think Sears made it and it was from the early 1980's? It's Dad's fault for that haha! I did want to know how every darn thing worked all in all.

Fast forward on this transport of my life to now, as you already know, I love to draw.... As of recent, I been drawing more often in between me making music on my PC. For me, drawing is a daily activity. My main drawing style is cartoons! I can draw and even pain realistically, but to preserve time, I just keep my art more as a simple expression of my other interests I have. I have to say these drawings revolve around The Simpsons and basketball for one! I have been drawing that way since middle school when Space Jam came out! It has gotten to a pretty good point now! The edges are crisp and things look professional! Mainly I love to draw poses and actions of basketball stuff like uniforms & outfits, and action poses.

At about the same time I was drawing a lot in my Middle School years, I began to mess around with music creation and the first program I used of all things was MARIO PAINT! Yes! Mario paint! The music making part of the paint program for the SNES was a very fun past-time that too started in around middle school. It got me into it because It looked fun and I could visually learn music! Oh... and that I did!! I thought at first it was a bit intimidating to learn music but I thought, what's the music creator gonna do? Yell at me?? LOL Drawing is all I ever did as a kid creatively. I used to tinker with our upright piano and harmonicas we had in our house but never thought much of it 🙂 That wet my foot in at least improvising music! That of witch reading music is very difficult for me even to this day....

I would make a lot of random sounding and funny dittlies using Mario paint and then record these right from the TV speaker! I have 1000's of tunes some very memorable! Unfortunately, my very first tape got magnetically ruined! And to add serious insult to injury, the tape got seriously eaten by the capstan...  Lucky mr fixit here could at least make it playable but I lost feet of tape.... The good news is I could salvage some audio. I have a warbly recording of this on my PC in a .APE wave file, I did this for other dozen tapes I have of those tunes! They are backed up to my pc from a tape deck. Over time I also stumbled on another creative game for the SNES was Fun N' Games! Need I say more? OMG the music maker on FnG was STUPENDOUS! The sound effects were hilarious as well as realistic! One could also use minor keys too! as MP could not. This was unfortunately a rental game :-(. Man have times changed! I have recordings of my random and cool tunes I made on that creative game pak day after day when I had it on hand! I'd say my guess is when I used Fun n' Games between 1995 and 1996!

Over time I became aware of computer music 😉 I used to watch Discovery Channel and there used to be a show on called The Next Step. On there they shown a cool segment on digital music and the future or music and interactivity! This in part inspired me to seek out "synthesizers" for what I did not know what I was looking for was  MIDI keyboards! I later learned of how PCs interact with them. I cannot recall my path on that discovery well off hand, but I eventually saved up enough money to purchase a MIDI compatible Yamaha DJX  keyboard from a local music shop in town! I am not sure, but I think the inserts that the keyboard came with had something for a kit called Voyetra Music Studio. This had software and a MIDI cable to hook up to a sound card! All was included! I bought that kit by mail order from that insert and was in heaven after I hooked up the kit! It had videos on the disc to help learn how to play but also how to set up MIDI! This was the heyday of music gold! I was very novice but got better over time! I must mention I was lazy as far as playing a keyboard goes and used my keyboard as a MIDI synth lol.... I used the piano roll exclusively like MARIO PAINT for crying out loud! I used my mouse to make music and this got to my clicky finger and wrist after a while....

Long story short, I learned of affordable customizable sound engines like Sound Blaster Live and had a HUGE HEYDAY with that setup! It all lead to the Creative X-FI witch got me into bigger soundfonts and later VSTs and VSTis! WOW! I could write a book on my discovery and progress as I remember a lot of how it all happened and my emotions that played into this along the way.

Like I said, I could write a book about all these details but I hold them to my heart every day. I just want to find where the inspiration went. It's just been difficult to learn the modern way of things 😕