The Alan Parsons Experience

Seeing APP In Technicolour

Please allow me to tell my story of how I encountered Alan Parsons' music and talent . . .

At 25, (I'm 51 now), I was tinkering with an old color TV and disconnected the horizontal and vertical deflection wires from the circuit board that lead to the yoke. I then proceeded to connect the TV yoke wire pairs to my stereo's left and right speakers in parallel; vertical coil wires to the left speaker and horizontal coil wires to the right speaker. Then, as I was reaching for a record to put on the turntable, a friend knocked at the door with a new LP he just bought and quite excited to share it with me. So, we threw it on the record player and fired up the system.

Needless to say, I was knocked out by the approach and texture of the sound, and my friend just stood, absolutely amazed at what the TV was doing with the music. To my added amazement, the bass opening of the first song drew some extremely playful and dramatic oval lines across the screen in real time. Because the convergence of the color circuitry kept the colors aligned, the lissajou wave forms were only in white. So, after taking a few moments to adjust the convergence so it would be out of whack, the TV wave forms were dancing in color to the music. Bass notes created huge, full-screen, multi-color ovals while the higher notes created smaller ones, generating some interesting patterns. Very much like some of the 'rounded' Windows Media Player visualizations of today.

For the next 2 hours we played the album over a couple of times and stared at the new video toy. Then I just had to know who was responsible for such an expertly arranged and produced bit of audio. "Hmmmm", I said. "Tales of Mystery and Imagination . . . Alan Parsons? Who's that?" It was 1976 and just reached the record stores. My friend abruptly left, taking his record, and followed him out the door to get my own copy of it. I've been buying every Alan Parsons album/CD since.

I later learned of Alan's work and influences across the industry. Most respectable.

Alan's work has inspired me to reach for excellence in all that I do. Even when I toy with my own musical works, I do my best to find the sonic sweet spots for effects, nuances and over all production.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

Submitted by Brother Kenneth Bread.

Editor: Holy cow! And I thought I'd been experimental when I ran my VCR backwards through my tape deck to get big stereo sound in the days before surround sound! We're all happy you didn't blow yourself up and are still with us to hear "A Valid Path".

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