Nearly a year ago, I played the Simon the Sorcerer theme on the Yamaha Tyros3 keyboard. Recently I taught myself another piece of gaming music nostalgia, this time from the classic puzzle game Lemmings. Using a bank of registration memory settings that I created, a Premium Style accompaniment, multipads, a range of voices and even a couple of Lemmings sound clips that I trigger with a foot pedal. I really hope you enjoy my latest performance.

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 3:03 — 11.9MB)

It is just before Christmas in 1994 and after a lot of family discussion resulting in the eventual expenditure of £599, weighing up carefully all the pros and cons of such a purchase, Santa Claus finally delivered an Acorn Archimedes A3010. This was in essence my very first personal computer, with 1MB memory, a 32bit RISC OS 3 operating system and crucially an internal floppy disk drive. Well today the specifications aren’t going to blow you away so I can forgive you for not feeling the same sense of glee and a lack of understanding at my persistence of waking my parents up at 4am to open my presents, however it opened the doorway into a new genre of gaming I had previously missed.

Point and click adventures back then and even now have a very special place in my heart and although there was a serious lull in releases a few years ago when many believed the genre extinct, the advent of the Nintendo Wii, the Apple iPhone/iPod touch and online services such as Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Store, these games are re-appearing in both their original form, remastered and even brand spanking new ones carrying on the legacy.

For me though it all started with Simon the Sorcerer…

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In the December / January 2005/2006 edition of the Yamaha Club Magazine, Jackie and Steve Marsden present the use of bass chords and this inspired me to create and record the following music.

Here is me playing the Tyros (1), with my interpretation of Steve Marsden’s arrangement of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. I have altered one of the main chords from A/C# to Ddim.

I have made a selection of registrations to make the transition through the piece of music simpler and also using a foot pedal to fill-self command on the style. Using multipads at the very beginning and using a left-voice to add a nice background sound, the style it self only comes in after the first loop of the music. Remember I am a self taught home enthusiast and not a professional.

I hope you enjoy as this is my first public video performance. Also note that the video was recorded seperate from the audio and it goes slightly out of sync near the end of the performance due to conversion problems.

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