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January 1, 2003

In the late 1980's I was in my home when a thunderstorm
struck. I had decided sometime before that it would be
cool if I could record a thunderstorm, so when this one
hit, I grabbed the Vesta Fire MR10b that I had recently
bought, grabbed my microphones (rubberbanding them into
baggies), and a cassette and went to work. I had the
recorder set up in the garage and the microphones hung
on a pair of clothesline posts.

I recorded thunderstorm for the next ten minutes or so.
Now the only question was, "what am I going to do with
this recording?" I had also recently purchased a little
four octave keyboard (Casiotone MT-68) that I liked to
play around on. I pulled that out and started playing,
building things up track by track, mixing down.

That's where it lay until I just recently (about a
year ago) purchased a CD-Recorder for my home stereo
system. I went digging through those old cassettes to
see what I wanted to preserve and discovered the old
Foundations tapes. I even discovered the two multitracks
that had not been (stupidly) destroyed.The condition of
those multitracks is a testimony to the quality of
Maxell cassette tape. Laying around in boxes, stacked
in, on, and around who knows what for thirteen years
or more. These multitracks were in pristine condition.
I even still have the MR10b. Though it has seen much
better days, it did the job and Foundations made it to CD.

Seven months ago, I finally purchased a CD-RW for my
Amiga 1200. A couple of months ago I got an incredible
deal on a G3 accellerated Mac 8100, and I have been
putting software on that, including Quick Time Pro 6.
I use that to, among other things, convert WAVE files
to MPEG format. The 8100 has a CD-ROM drive, so I have
been able to move those Foundation WAVE files (done in
MakeCD) over to the Mac for compressing to MPEG format.
Now they are here. I hope you enjoy them.

                                     William F. Maddock
                       --
                       
Foundation1 was the first part to be recorded, and it
was as a direct result of having the thunderstorm on
tape. I decided to do something that could, however
poorly, illustrate the foundations of music; so this
piece is very basic: just two guitar tracks fronting
the thunderstorm.