In early 1994 I bought a Yamaha SY85 music workstation, with a bank loan taken out just a few months after I had got a Proper Job. I had always enjoyed writing music and now I had an opportunity to actually record some of it properly.
Yamaha SY85 music workstation
The SY85 is a synth, a sequencer, a drum machine and – in a rather limited way – a sampler. Technologically, this is a very crude piece of kit by today’s standards, but one mustn’t forget that it was manufactured in 1992.
It took me a while to get my head around the sampling side of things, since the SY85 needed samples in a very particular format, a format to which I could only convert audio files using a DOS-based program running on my old, slow 486 PC that I had at the time. Figuring that out involved tracking down email mailing lists of others who owned the same model and swapping tips and tricks. All the samples and sequences were loaded to/from the SY85 using a double-density 3.5 inch floppy drive, which made work very slow. However, I seemed to have plenty of time on my hands in those days (pre-kids, pre-wife!) and so that didn’t really matter.
Musically, the SY85 provides plenty of scope for experimentation. Almost all the tracks I composed were designed to be instrumentals; those with vocals were typically instrumental tracks with some added vocal samples. I never recorded my own voice and the equipment I had wouldn’t have made that very easy in any case.
One of the first tracks I composed and recorded follows: this was my first real attempt at programming the sequencer properly and I think it worked out quite well:
It is now my intention to release these fully finished tracks from what I am now referring to as “Dave Ewart: The Back Catalogue”, and some unfinished/demo tracks from what I am calling “Dave Ewart: The Lost Demo Tapes”. I will release two or three tracks at a time over the next few weeks, hopefully with some vaguely interesting anecdotes and notes about the composing and recording process at the same time.
All tracks are licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commerical Share-Alike license. 
This license means that you are free to distribute and copy, provided that you attribute it as being my work. If you wish to make derivative copies (e.g. remixes) you must release those works under this same license. Commercial use is not permitted.