Instrumental music eras have been sporadic in pop music history over the last 60 years. Instrumental Beats is an album of tunes written by John Sparrow contemporaneously that reflects three of these different periods.
The first was the brief period in early dawnings of soul (Soul Reacher) and reggae (Reggae Stroll) in the 1960s and 1970s respectively. Two fundamentally different rhythms. All were recorded using sound-on-sound with an Akai quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder.
The second major instrumental period was associated with the advent of synthesisers in synth-pop in the 1980s. The rhythms of the tunes here, vary between slower anthemic pieces (Intrepid, Freedom, Find The Key Open The Door, Searching For Life, Bell, Ripples Of Moonlight), neo-classical (Synth Quartet), dance (Westward, Breeze In My Hair) and swing (Happy, Jig, Flying In The Sky) beats.
They were performed mainly using a Roland System-100 monophonic synthesiser. Later tracks used a basic Casio keyboard to add chords. They utilised Cakewalk, Logic and Cubase platforms.
The third period was from 1999-2001 with an emphasis upon techno. Again, with a range of rhythms. Tracks are Blobby, Back On Top, Techno2v5, Vangetthis and HipHopBack. Tracks benefitted from being able to use VST instruments which made for more realistic sounds. They all used Cubase as the platform.
Click on the album cover to go to the Ditto smartlink page on the Ditto website where you can stream the songs on any of the major streaming platforms you use (e.g. Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Amazon Music, Deezer, Tidal, Pandora, Boomplay)
