Me and my Atari ST- Atari is Still Alive

[Atari Music Network]

In 1985 when I was four, the only Atari music I ever heard came from my Atari 2600 game system. Little did I know that was the year Atari unleashed the 520ST home computer, forever shaping the future of electronic music production. It actually wasn't until grade 7, 1991, when I was formally introduced to the Atari 1040 STe in music class.

“This is my dongle and it's highly sensitive. Don't ever touch it when it's plugged in!", the music teacher warned. The class laughed. We had gathered around the school's new $4000 expenditure to witness a Korg M1 and Atari joined together in holy MIDI matrimony. Within days, the Atari disappeared into his office - no one ever saw it again. The following year, I played a rip-roaring rendition of 'Great Balls of Fire' for the spring concert - all sequenced on my 2 track Kawai FS680. The teacher was impressed! He approached me and asked if I'd be interested in recording some tracks on the school's Atari. I was ecstatic! The next day after school, he let me into his office which was now a monstrosity of modules, synths, and one glorious Atari running Notator SL! As I began recording, I was astounded as he 'quantized' my nervous sputters and morphed my humble Cmaj chord into a open C7 with the click of mouse. The Atari was truly powerful – I wanted one so bad. Unfortunately at that time, all my mom could afford was a Radio Shack Tandy.

By the time I was in high school, Atari had released the ultimate mothership - the Atari Falcon 030. But as fate would have it, that mighty ship sank with the company's new Jaguar and Lynx game systems as its anchors. Many companies tried to buoy the marvelous Falcon 030; in 1995, C-Lab (now known as Emagic) bought the rights to make another round of Falcon models with improved audio features. Unfortunately, too many sheeple were enslaving themselves to the cheaper PCs and Macs - that venture ultimately failed. Other companies tried to clone and improve upon the Falcon, such as the lovely Milan and Hades. But for the most part, it was all over; millions of users found their computers unsupported and obsolete. Atari went underground...

One of those millions was my new high school music teacher. He owned a gorgeous Atari TT and would often lecture at the Toronto Atari Federation. I didn't find out about his secret Atari fetish until grade 10 when he waltzed into the computer lab to catch a peek at the school's crappy, new Mac Performas. He spotted me sitting in a corner trying to score a tune with Finale and asked to try it. After some rather cursory language attempting to drag and drop a quarter note, he was livid. “What a piece of *! I wouldn't want to write music on this thing! Atari is still way superior to Mac!”, he bellowed. Well, the proud lab teacher who instigated the school's lavish purchase heard him and came over with her feather's ruffled - a rather entertaining Mac vs. Atari geek fight ensued. However, allow me to shed some light on the lab teacher's actual computer knowledge: once she walked into a Future Shop where my best friend worked asking if he could upgrade the memory on her Commodore 128 so she could run Windows 95!

After many months of saving money, I finally found a smokey-yellow Atari 1040 STFM in the classifieds. Against my mom's will, I went over to this creepy musician's studio located in the lovely 'Regent Park'(Toronto's oldest ghetto). I knocked on his decrepit wood door. His pale face peered out through a side window with a crooked smile. As the door creaked open, I found myself getting excited as he stood there holding his dongle in his hand. Sounds perverted, eh? Inside, his studio wasn't so bad. He showed off the fancy new Power Mac and Korg Trinity workstation he bought for his new TV/Radio job. He was purging everything old - including his so-called 'outdated Roland and Moog Analogues' for a couple hundred bucks each. Pause....wipe your drewl, it's true – one of them was a MIDIfied Juno 60. I quickly gave him my money and picked up the heavy box full of Atari goodness and left. Waving goodbye, his eyes watered up as he called back out to me, “I once orchestrated an entire movie soundtrack on that thing from beginning to end all on 1MB of RAM. Atari sure was ahead of the game back in the day! I'm really going to miss that machine!” Little did he know, Atari was still ahead of the game. But the story didn't end here!

As I ventured out of the ghetto, a police car pulled up beside me. “Where did you get that computer from kid?”, one of them asked. I quickly presented the shredded classified ad. After verifying the contents of my box, they relaxed and proceeded to recant tales of their Atari teenage years from the 80's. I listened politely as they lectured me with a litany of great games I should play. I felt the video game conversation was rather degrading towards my MIDI monster machine so I in turn lectured them on what this Atari was actually for and truly capable of. They looked at me like I was nuts - it was 1996 after all and Mac was King. But I knew I had something very special under my arms - my Atari journey had begun.

I have to admit though, over the years I've tried to cheat. I've spent $1000's on the newest and coolest PC workstations running Cubase Studio and every * VST I could find. Of coarse, I never composed anything. All my time was consumed with nonsense: configuring settings, upgrading patches, relentlessly rebooting, reformatting hard drives – the time added up. Atari never gave me these problems. Last year, I got rid of everything 'modern' and turned the clock back to a better time. Today, my studio has evolved into a Frankenstein monstrosity: three Atari Falcons, each with dual compact flash drives, internal SCSI 3.5” SD card readers in place of floppy drives, and all connected to a 22” flat screen so the nosy neighbors can see Atari Cubase run from across the street. One Falcon performs as the sequencer – the other as a virtual synth running Maxymiser Live! The third, I have yet to decide - perhaps it'll run ACE MIDI...

In 2010, it's obvious the once underground Atari realm has evolved into a pop cult culture. From MIDI to chiptunes and Ebay to YouTube, Atari computers are becoming popular again among the original and newer generations; the Atari Coldire Project and Blip Festival best illustrate this point! As a cult culture, many Atarians exhibit an exclusive system of beliefs and practices outside conventional computer users. Furthermore, they give a great deal of devotion to an ancient ideal not understood or recognized by most technophiles – built in MIDI and embedded operating systems anyone? And in some cases, Atarians isolate themselves from PC and Mac users altogether by using their machines for internet and word processing. Speaking for myself, every time I boot my Falcons from the Atari logo to Cubase in 10 seconds, I feel a great sense of spiritual fulfillment – don't you? Atari offers very little frustration and barriers for computer musicians wishing to make music out of the box. But that's all I'm going to comment on the matter - the rest is for you to write!

- Donovan

[David Etheridge]

*** POST ORIGINALLY BY NCGM ***

Thank you for the great story which I found very enjoyable.

I too spent years in the PC wilderness, wasting so much time trying to get something that was a direct replacement for my STE in both feel and use, also to be an upgrade from my Fostex DMT8 MkII multitrack and racks full of modules etc. Trying to go the PC route was a MAJOR mistake that I bitterly regret, because I now face an uphill task to redo my setup and begin writing and recording again. I'm getting there bit by bit though and I only need to sort out what my audio recording device is going to be; perhaps a rackmount 24bit/96KHz recorder.

In 1985 I was fourteen and just beginning my interest in writing my own music. At that time there was literally no way my pocket money could afford an Atari ST or any computer for that matter, so the best I could do is a cheap Casio keyboard payed for in weekly installments from my mum's home mail order catalogue. Later in 1994 one of my friends wanted to sell me his Atari 1040STE and SM124 monitor with a cracked copy of Cubase 2.0. I jumped at the chance but even though I was working full time, I still had to pay him in £20 installments! This was a big turning point for me and the quality of my music writing and recording went through the roof as I became skilled at MIDI sequencing. Prior to this my experience of the Atari ST, was seeing it running games in game stores or at friends houses.

The 1040STE sat on a shelf in the corner of my tiny bedroom for the next six years doing solid work. It wasn't until late 1999 that I even attempted to load a game! I saw the 1040STE as a musical instrument and tool and the built in MIDI ports and professional software made that vision concrete in my mind, despite the fact that everyone I had ever known with an ST only played games. I later began to meet musicians that only used them for music though.

My 1040STE was upgraded to 4MB in late 1998, along with a second MIDI OUT port via the Modem port, a Horizon MIDI Expander which I saw a mini review on in Sound On Sound magazine in spring 1998. I used this setup to great effect by having the STE totally automate the audio inputs and outputs on my rack modules, thus giving me a fully automated mix. The audio from my Fostex multitrack was fed into my Yamaha MU100R modules (I have four!) and the STE controlled them with MIDI data, and finally the audio was fed into a Spirit Folio Notepad mixer and from there into a Fostex D5 DAT machine. After that a CDR was made from the DAT machine tape. It sounds long winded but in actual fact it was logical and therefore easy to use and understand. There was none of this ASIO driver *, latency or crap drivers or conflicts etc; if something did not work it was either a * cable or you had plugged something into the wrong socket and this was soon spotted and dealt with. PC problems however are not so easy to deal with and often there is NO solution, and so you go buying more hardware in the hope that you may find a solution....

I also used my STE to database my music CD collection, plus from 2000 to mid 2001 I used it to do photo work, email reading (saved on floppy disk at a friends place), a few games, audio sample editing and lots of other stuff. Fast forward to 2010 and I three 4MB STE computers and my combined setup consists of:

• 3x 4MB 4160 STE (authentic badges) TOS 1.62 x2 and TOS 2.06
• IDEal IDE interface + 4GB Sandisk CompactFlash drive
• PeST PC mouse interface
• Eiffel PS/2 Mouse and Keyboard interface + LED display
• ICD The Link 2 SCSI host adapter
• Acard AEC-7720U IDE to SCSI adapter
• Yamaha CRW-8424S SCSI CD writer
• Microdeal Replay 16 and ST Replay audio sampler cartridges
• Gamars V-Box (displays ST video output on CRT and LCD monitors)
• Supera Color HD (displays ST video output on CRT and LCD monitors)
• Forget-Me-Clock II cartridge
• DAATA Scan hand scanner cartridge
• Vidi-ST video capture cartridge
• Horizon MIDI expander (modem serial port)
• Cumana External Floppy drive
• Atari ST Terminal Emulator VT-100 Terminal Emulator cartridge
• Atari SM124 Monochrome monitor
• Various minor addons, cables, extra mice and so on
• Marcer's Game DVD + Bonus CD released in January 2009
• Possibly every software and game title known to mankind!

I plan to buy an Ethernet cartridge interface or two and hopefully a 16MHz or faster CPU upgrade if I get very lucky!

Atari ST(E) computers have brought me so much pleasure, satisfaction and fun that I cannot for the life of me understand why I abandoned them! I suppose like many other people, I became hoodwinked by the whole 'studio in a box' PC concept, plus the plugins and applications seemed to powerful and exciting and in some ways they are, but I am afraid the PC experience for me has been a futile one and I now welcome my STE back with open arms!


NCGM

[bid]

These are really great stories. I am not an experienced musician, but I used my Atari 520STe for many years, from when I first got it new as an excited teenager with my combined christmas and birthday savings right the way through university and then unfortunately moved to the PC.

While my friends had Amigas to play games on and one or two had Atari's I remember that this computer was half the price of the Amiga. I'll never forget when I got it home and plugged it in how amazed I was at the software and games. My older brother had a Sinclair ZX81 we still used to play with, and I had never seen any thing better than a Specturm to be honest, although one person i knew did have an Amiga. It was incredible.

What was different though, was that the software from magazines such as ST format was mainly applications, music, art, fractals, and productivity. I learned a lot about many topics, and I enjoyed mainly music and 3D raytracing and rendering. I am now a 3D CAD professional and have a website http://www.thebigconsultant.com

The ST could produce photorealistic raytraces and view them in 19,000 colours using a programe called PhotoChrome. It took the ST sometimes several days to produce a computer generated raytrace image!! Now this takes fractions of a second on the PC. But for some reason I still love that Atari!

I think part of it is that I know deep down, how simple and effective it was. Never any problems, unless I left a disk near a speaker, and always turns on in seconds. Something about it, and other computers from the era has never been recaptured.

Anyway, I also did a lot of graphics work, and music using some pretty poor programs at first. There was one with an Atari Productivity Pack which was amazing for two weeks. Then I got a midi keyboard and plugged it in with leads I bought and I only had a software called Acommpanist from a magazine coverdisk. I went to the local flea market where they had DOS floppy disks lablelled "GEM PD" which had stacks of MIDI tunes on them for a quid or so. Amazing. And I learned from them, and made my own. Then I found Quartet, which was fun and although simple, was great to make looping tracks and put my music down quickly. The final program I used was BreakThru which is an amazing sequencer, and I'm really surprised people dont talk about it. It was so professional against what I had seen (obviously I have never seen Cubase or Notator) and I would often use this to record and edit my musical ideas.

So the machine gradually fell out of use, but was always in my mind. I had put 4MB SIMMS in it for about £5 in the late 90's and had rehoused the keyboard when I used it at university. But it was lacking in something.

Then last year whilst doing some work for a client, as I work for myself, I saw in his junk room a weird looking Atari Computer. It was an Atari Mega4 ST with a mono monitor, huge plotter attached and a hard drive unit. He said take it, and explained that he used to use it to do all the CAD design work for his business, and clearly, this had been a work horse.

I had only imagined what these machines were, and in fact the Mega ST was not really much more powerful than my ordinary 4MB STe, and sadly lacked DMA sound and stereo connectors. But when I started it up, I then realised what a hard drive can do for these machines! In old ST Format magazines you were looking at thousands of pounds for just 20 or 40 MB and I had looked in later years in vain for a ICD "The Link" to hook to an old Apple drive I had found for £5 in a junk shop. So sadly I had never seen the Atari running with a hard drive. It had clearly been designed from the off with this in mind from the start. The Atari DMA link is actually very fast, and I realised that with this power, the computer would have been useful for a much longer period. I had in mind to use this to create a MIDI studio, and have some fun again.

Then my girlfriend started working for a musical project for kids, and she wanted to produce some tracks, and I knew that there was no option for me than to use the Atari. Ive now got a few bits and bobs, but have not yet managed to get the time over the last two months to get everything up and working.

I have however found a computer that has the stereo DMA sound outputs, and a hard drive, and is a but faster, and is an Atari. Its a rather beaten up and yellowed Atari TT 030 that I found from a factory plugged into a CNC machine to run automated manufacturing. Heh heh. So I have bought an Akai sampler for £30 and a mixing desk, and am now creating my dream machine studio, and with colour VGA.

I would like to ask David for some help. I have also obtained a ACARD AEC-7720UW SCSI to IDE converter from ebay, and I really need to get rid of the TT's 20 year old hard drive. Its VERY noisy, and I suspect its on its way out. I'll also post some pictures, as this machine has been through some tough times in a very difficult factory environment and I have had to conduct some repairs. I'd like to know how to connect a IDE device using the ACARD and also use the machine to edit samples and upload to the sampler. Currently getting a decent (and quiet) hard drive going is my current aim. Trust me, this machine will be put to some use, when I have time outside of my work, and I'm planning on doing some recording very soon, and have had to make a start with the Mega4 but this TT is going to be priceless.

Ive also got some other issues, but this computer is making me realise what the Atari's could have achieved if it was not for some short sighted marketing and the sheeple buying into Microsofts cartel. Im also hoping that I can upload samples via SCSI or using a software called AkaiSeX for the Atari and really get things going. Are there any hard core technical people who can help me to make the modifications to the machine that I require?

Im also keen to find out soon, how the top of the range machine handles the 3D graphics I used to do. Perhaps it will only take it half a day to render!

Many thanks for your interesting stories. I cant wait to try Maxymiser and possibly some more suitable software, or even Notator or Cubase

[mal7921]

Back in 1986 I bought my first computer, a Sinclair Spectrum 128K just literally a couple of months before Amstrad took them over. One of the key draws for me was the RS232 port which was also labeled as a MIDI port, though I never heard of any adapters available for it.

Soon after Amstrad's takeover of Sinclair they announced new machines including the Spectrum +3 with built in disk drive, which to my mind would make music application loading much quicker, once I finally managed to get hold of one I was happy with and with that the saving began.

Then I entered the twilight zone...

October 1987 and Atari announce that the price of the ST was to come down to £299 in the UK, literally £50 more than the price announced for the spectrum +3 and on checking the specifications, the ST had proper MIDI ports and not the fudged compromise of the Spectrum 128K series. Shortly after this I saw a program on computers which that week was showing what the Atari ST could do, which featured Pro24 connected up to some MIDI synthesizers and for me that sealed it. The extra £50 needed was more than justified and my second computer was going to be an Atari ST.

So after finishing school on the 3rd November 1987, I went into town armed with £300 to buy the computer that would change my world...

Once I'd handed over my money and had the large box i my hands, it was back to my Dads car and straight back home to set up and play with my shiny new purchase... Once home I unpacked the STfm from its box and connected everything together, connecting to the TV in the lounge and switching on, I watched as the machine spring to life and booted from the blank floppy disk I had purchased earlier in the week.

I have to admit, even then my initial thought on the desktop background colour was along the lines of 'What the heck were they thinking?'

But the machine was alive and with the basic disk in the floppy drive, I rebooted to see what goodies there were. Control panel, at least I could change that horrible green, ST Basic, was Ok but looking through the commands showed it was rather limited, now was the time to try the games I had bought earlier, Sentinel and Chopper-X.

Compared to the spectrum, it was a world away, colours and more than 2 colours in any 8x8 pixel square which made the screen look almost alive by comparison to what had gone before.

It was a few days before I tracked down a dodgy copy of Pro24, but once I did I started looking through what it could do, even though I had no MIDI equipment yet. That was soon to change as a Yamaha DX-100 had appeared in a second hand shop on the other side of town. With what remained of my savings I ventured across town and bought it. With this and Pro24 and a newly acquired Mono monitor emulator, I started trying things out and experimenting.

About a year later I was working in the local computer shop in Huddersfield Town center and able to expand my equipment collection, as well as upgrade the RAM to 1MB and have the floppy drive upgraded to a double sided drive, both of which were £100 upgrades (At reduced rates for staff!) in 1988. This allowed be to use the new, bigger and better Pro24 version 3, which for the first time in my history with Steinberg products was a genuine copy, complete with dongle.

I had also increased my studio setup, with Mixer, Yamaha PSS680, Yamaha TX81z and a Casio HZ-600. The DX100 had been sold to provide funding for the memory and floppy upgrades, not bad considering I sold it for twice the amount I had paid for it.

By the year 2000, I had moved over to a PC based setup, moving the now considerably larger MIDI setup over to the new system that was supposedly the future. While there were features that my STfm could not realistically do, there was always the feeling that things were never as tight on the PC as they had been on the ST. Worse still, Steinberg released Cubase VST5 and a few weeks later released the version 5.02 update which broke the programs ability to save anything at all. Further updates cured the problem but it showed that there were inherent issues with being on the PC, namely quality control from the OS up!

By 2007 everything had migrated to the Mac running Logic Studio, a better solution and tighter than the PC, however it still was not as tight as the ST. I still had a PC laptop running Cubase but this was being used less and less as I got used to the look, feel and sound options available within Logic. By this time I had also amassed my Atari collection, including 2 Falcons, a Stacy and the legendary ST Book laptop. I set up an idea's notepad using a Falcon running Cubase and right away I felt at home, though it took a few sizemic events to finally move me back onto the Atari's almost full time.

The first of these was the divorce, while I lost little kit in that process, I had moved into a smaller place and had to be more considerate with what I was setting up and where. The second was a burglary in which my Cubase laptop was stolen, along with the dongle. While the laptop was replaced, the dongle wasn't covered and Steinberg at the time refused to replace it. With that all Steinberg media on the PC was either thrown in the bin, burnt or sold and for a time even the Atari platform was moved to Logic as I re-assembled my music setup around the MacBook Pro I had received through the insurance.

2010 though was where I discovered this place, coincidentally as I was pretty much moving back onto the Atari's full time with external MIDI gear rather than the software studio's I had come to dispise over the years. Through this site I managed to get the Falcon up and running, find drivers for one of my interfaces and gather software to do all the audio edititng I should ever need. The studio was now complete and ready to take on the world.

Then AMN died...

It sounds stupid, but I went through a period I can only describe as mourning, finally tracking down other members here on atari-forum.com we came to the conclusion the site was gone and I started putting some basic plans together to try and replace it, including downloading as many pages as possible from Google's cache and then NGCM saw the original sites owner was selling stuff on ebay, which gave me the chance to get the original site back rather than try and launch a substitute site of some sort.

A month after it vanished, AMN was back online including most of the content, though some had been lost in the restoration process (Including my reply to this thread(!)).

In September 2010 I bought the copyright to the site and took whole ownership and responsibility for it, allowing it to continue.

Quite a journey from that day on November 3rd 1987

[bid]

Thanks Mal. Interesting story.

Well I for one am VERY GLAD that Atari Music Network is very much alive!!

I have no option also to create my dream atari based studio. And thank to Atari Forum and AMN I have now managed to start getting somewhere with my new/old atari computers!! I've now managed to put an old PC 1.44MB drive into the Atari and using some soldering skills it has been accepted! Now i can get my music files across to the machine it belongs on and link up with the sampler!! Heh heh.

These machines were just made for music, and really that is probably its only legacy. Its a piece of hardware that is perfect for this and a lot of fun too.

I am amazed by your ST Book computer. Boy what a find! I'd really like to see one in my lifetime. I used the STe happily enough for many years, little understanding of what I was missing out on. I think perhaps I might find amazement for quite a while yet having not used a hard drive or even enhancements, like Magic OS, multitasking and the wealth of hardware and software that is available pretty reasonably now. Im amazed for example that the ST can multitask, and I am sure it will be a lot more fun when I can run the programs I wish to and I am feeling comfortable with my new studio!!

[mal7921]

Enhancements like MagiC are rarely of any use when doing Atari Music, so always approach with caution. As an example, Cubase and Logic will not work under MultiTos or MiNT, even though they will work just fine on machines that can run these OS's.

Hard drives are useful, if you don't have a hard drive, even an external floppy will make life so much easier with a Mega ST or regular all in one ST machine. If you can find one, a Megafile 44 or a Zip drive with an ICD SCSI interface will allow you to have multi-boot options, one cartridge for MagiC and one for Cubase for example. The ICD and ZIP drive would be cheaper, but the Megafile keeps it all 'In-House' so to speak.

The other (Easier) option is the UltraSATAN.

All this does cost money, so you have to make choices wisely, but if you can't afford any hard drive option at the moment, go for an external floppy drive at the very minimum

[bid]

Yes. I have gone back to the built in OS and looking at preparing it with the enhancements that are compatible and keep the music timing tight. There are a few things to learn again, but this is so much simpler than setting up Windows. The Auto folder is wonderfully simple, and I wish computers were like this now! So simple.

I acquired two SCSI drives, one SCSI 40 built into the TT030 and a external Ladbroke Computing drive with a ICD AdSCSI inside and SCSI 40 again.

However, these old drives are noisy, and a quiet system is the beauty of the old 520STe I used to use. The ZIP is the best idea, but so far I cant find one cheaply on eBay, they seemto be rare and popular with musicians for using with samplers too. Ideally I need to get an SCSI upgrade card for the S2800 and thus use the ZIP with the Akai and Atari.

Secondly, I am trying to add a SCSI to IDE converter to the TT030 to have a quiet Compact Flash drive. Also could use this to add a CD-RW. But it is looking like the UltraSATAN is going to be the easiest way to get data from the PC to the Atari and I can use this with my STe, MegaST and TT030 to swap data and also upload from almost any modern device, even my mobile phone uses SD Card! But the price is high at £85, it would however make things very easy indeed, and it is an amazing device. It is really quite incredible how enthusiasts have produced equipment that enhances the original hardware, and it really shows the versatility of these old machines, and its a shame that the original manufacturer did not see this and create these upgrades. It is clear to me that with add on cards such as video and devices such as CD-ROM and Zip that the TT for example is at least as powerful as the PC's of the day, and a lot simpler and cleaner in operation.

I was amazed when I tried the Magic multitasking OS on it, and although this timeslicing might not be good for MIDI stability (and possibly this is the reason for the Atari being so good for music and MIDI) the colourful OS and realtime graphics, just like in Win95 was ahead of its time it seems, and certainly took me by surprise. Still it is good advice to know that the standard OS would be best for Notator and Cubase, and for this I think the next step is to put in a good large silent solid state hard drive. Incredible.

[mal7921]

Have a look here for a working example of a TT using a flash drive conversion

[Spadz]

One definitive vote for the Ultrasatan here.
I've put a 4gb SDHC and my Mega st4 boots and runs flawlessly. And hissing from a SCSI HD. And it's way more reliable.

The guy who was making them is in UK and don't answer my emails anymore...

The transaction went fine, but not that fine. Since I'm in Canada, it was kind of a chance I took. But it was worth it.

[NCGM]

Great story Malc and I have to confess that being the soppy sod I am, I shed a slight tear. For me the 1970s / 1980s micro computer era was to me, was what the 1950s / 1960s era of Rock n' Roll music was for our parents. They were both the dawn of something new, exciting, fun and powerful that would change the course of history......and for the computer era we were there when it all happened! I'm not sure what special golden era todays teenagers are going through if any, but I hope it is something equally amazing.


NCGM

[mal7921]

Good to have you back NCGM.", it was getting way to quiet without you


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[NCGM]

Thanks Malc, actually I do visit here to check for new posts etc. It's so frustrating for me right now, as the car crash is still leaving things to sort out three months later; there is also a lot of financial matters and more to deal with. I keep crossing my fingers and hoping that I can find both the time and proper motivation to do something creative. The motivation thing is purely depression related and something I have suffered from badly since my teens, but I have managed to achieve some good things in my time musically etc. So I know that I will be back in the saddle again at some point.


NCGM

[masaruta4at]

managed to achieve some good things in my time musically etc.