Music

The Music of YAK is instrumental and according to the reviews to date, it is being categorised in the genre of Symphonic Progressive Rock. Certainly many of my favourite bands are likewise categorised, so I'm not going to complain !

The music of YAK has been described as "excellent", "eclectic", "unnecessarily complicated" "unnecessary - without the complicated", "fairly simple" and most recently "not all interesting"! However it all depends what you like as an individual - and of course whether or not you give the music a chance. The vast majority of reviews to date have been positive ones.

When Yak split in 1984, I acquired my first multitrack recorder, a Fostex A8, and I made my own versions of the YAK tracks. Much later in 2001 I managed to acquire the keyboard of my dreams, a Kurzweil K2600x which was the master workstation that allowed me to at last have a real "piano" sound inside a digital workstation (amongst other things !) The Kurzweil gave me the opportunity to record the YAK tracks again using it's internal sequencer & together with a Phillips Audio CD recorder (from Argos) I was up & running to burn my own CD's.

The First project was to record a collection of the old Yak tracks emulating the 4 piece band electronically. This is never easy & clearly many of the tracks would sound better if played by the band, however I have done my best. The drums are always the hardest to replicate electronically however I have spent a lot of time programming them and have received many comments from several professional reviewers who have said that the drum samples & programming of them are some of the best they have ever heard - this is fantastic feedback & I am mighty grateful for it. Others have been less complimentary, but I am not going to loose any sleep over it !

And so it was the the 1st Yak album "Dark Side of the Duck" was born in February 2004. Six of the tracks were original Yak numbers from the early 80' the others were more recently composed.

Dark Side of the Duck

I have lovingly ;0) prepared MP3 clips of all 8 tracks on the album - approx 30 seconds each & all about half a meg in size

If you click on any of the files on the MP3 page it will either start playing in your MP3 media, download to your hard disc from where you can start it, or it won't do anything - depending on your PC set up