Using his home MIDI setup, Ken knocked this out in a single day. It helped get him the job at Sierra On-Line as a game music composer. He didn't use any quantization because, in some places of the sequence, it was so far off time that quantizing made it worse, and the software, MIDIMATE III for his Atari 8-bit, was so primitive that it didn't have a piano roll or individual note editing. If you made a mistake, you had to record the whole track again. Fortunately, you could have many, many tracks and could devote one to a single phrase, and you could merge tracks to make room for more. One saving grace, the software had "undo"!
At that time, he had the following stuff of varrying quality in his home studio.
- Atari 1200 home computer
- Hybrid Arts MidiMate MIDI interface
- Hybrid Arts MidiTrack III MIDI sequencing software
- Korg DW 6000 keyboard
- Yamaha TX-7 sound module
- Yamaha FB-01 sound module
- Oberheim Matrix 6 sound module
- Korg P3 piano module
- E-mu SP-12 drum sampler machine
- E-mu Drumulator drum machine
- Mackie low-end mixing board
- Tascam Portastudio 4 track cassette recorder
- Alesis Microverb reverb effects unit
- Crate rack-mounted pre-amp
- Boss Headphones
- A pair of home-made speakers using high end car stereo speakers
