The Basement
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- The Basement
MARKUS JOHNSON PRODUCTIONS is a studio specializing in a unique approach to the virtual recording.
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Canton, GA
30114
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Music for a song
As a kid, I was surrounded by music. Family get together’s always seem to end on a musical note. We had a record player that sat in a cabinet with two 15 inch sub woofers. As my mother would play record after record, I would stare at the record labels, the pictures on the front and back of the albums and then imagine that I was present in the recording. In the mind of a child, I thought that the band was inside of the cabinet because the vibrations of the music would be in sync with the beat. I was drawn to the drums and piano. I was a rather noisy kid but I was determined that I would play the drums even if I had to bang on paint buckets. I played drums in church and continued to progress in my ability. I was self taught. The music I listened to was my inspiration.
As a teenager, I desired to get really serious about playing the keyboard. My uncle purchased a Yamaha PSR-19 for me and I played it until one day I saw a puff of smoke come out of it.
The music of the 90’s had a rather digital sound. One of my music inspirations was a Gospel artist by the name of John P. Kee. His music grabbed my soul. I didn’t want to be him but I sure wanted my music to have his sound. I looked at the credits on the back of the cd and saw that he used Roland digital equipment. So I wanted a Roland.
In that time of keyboard technology, the running keyboard of the day was the Roland D-70. Everybody had one. I never got one though. I had a desire to multitrack my music. I wasn’t able to afford one at the time, so I got creative. I used cassette tapes to make my tracks with. This was a tedious process and very time consuming. Thank God for technology. I’d have two recorders; one for playback and the other for recording. The idea was to stack the instrumentation as you would on a sequencer. By the time I got done with the song, it sounded terrible. My final track sounded like multiple air conditioners running in the background. Later, I acquired a Roland XP80. I finally reached my goal in tracking. I had to learn how to mix and also how to arrange musically. It’s very easy for one instrument to do too much. My early recordings sounded like a jam session and everyone in the band was taking a solo from start to finish. It was madness but it was purely authentic. After the XP80, I moved on the Roland FA76. In the tail end of the 90’s and into the early 2000’s, the samples of sounds were advancing in quality. I catered to Roland because in my opinion, their sounds were raw and without tons of eq’s and reverbs. Korg was always thin and layered with reverb and high’s so I wasn’t that impressed. Later, I started adding perfection to my tracking ability. I wanted to interpret on the keyboard how a bassist would play or how a drum player would play. With better sampled sounds, I was able to pull this off but it takes skill and the right touch. Whenever I would play my music for people, they ask, “Who’s playing the drums?” I’d laugh. They’d ask the same thing about the other instruments that I perfected in my interpretation. People started asking me to track for them and the rest is history.
