Cincinnati, Ohio, resident Bill Kibler was going to call himself Virtual Virtuoso, but since that was being used by a company in California, he put one of his interests to use and became PinWiz (for pinball wizard).

Though Vienna/Strasse/6809 was begun with idea to show off his MIDI files, "it actually has become my principal creative outlet for the last two years," Kibler says. In January 1998, he had little idea what his three-megabyte site would someday become, but his original enthusiasm has waned little since then.

These days, "I have mixed feelings for several of the content ideas [on my site] now. It's possible that I may develop the site more intensely for musical ideas and move the other interests to another site," something many website makers often do when their sites start to fill the megabyte allotments. "Still, they help fill in the picture of my personality and background."

An eclectic site if there ever was one, visitors here will find pinball art, soup recipes, band organ information, a composer gallery, fractals, MIDIs, and much more, most with a depth of study not found on similar sites. Future visits to the site will likely find added band organ info, perhaps with original music for it, more original MIDI transcriptions to the Composer Gallery and Bach pages, and an expanded MIDI tutorial.

Kibler's experience with MIDIs goes back to the beginnings of computers and his childhood. "Well, I recall that as an electronic experimenter from about age 12, I had been interested in making weird sounds with electronics. In high school I produced electronic background sounds for a school theatrical production. In college I studied 'classical' electronic music production, making miles of tape (single track) with recordings of filter-swept noise, oscillators of various kinds, and long sustained (real ) instrumental tones, and other 'found' sounds. Then, I would cut lengths of these tapes, in 'note' lengths, and splice them into musical compositions, making envelopes and transitions between notes by varying the angle of the splice or even scraping away the emulsion with a razor blade. And of course some 'samples' were used backwards for effect. And finally, these splice-filled individual tracks were combined by mixing with a recorded track on a two-track machine and bouncing from one side to the other, adding a track at a time to the mix. Tedious and noisy.

"Then, around 1968, Wendy Carlos' Switched On Bach arrived on the musical scene, amazing classical and popular audiences alike with its near-perfect performances of some of Bach's most popular works. The record spent many years as the best-selling classical recording of all time. (My arrangment of the Bach 3rd. Brandenburg 1st. movt. is kind of a 'Hommage a Wendy.') The record featured the Moog (rhymes with vogue) synthesizer and was a revelation to the world of how groups of formerly separate electronic modules could be combined using voltage control into an expressive musical instrument.

"Having continued my interest in electronics in 1976 I started assembling an analog synthesizer of my own design. The finished product is pictured on my Bio page. It has five oscillators, a multi-mode filter, a low-pass filter, two envelope generators, two different types of modulators, an eight-step analog sequencer, noise (white, pink, and red), a four-in two-out mixer and a 1000-note digital sequencer built in and so could be programmed in advance to play a long sequence of notes, but programming, mixing, and synchronizing to existing tracks was still very tedious.

"In 1978 I got interested in microprocessors, building a 'trainer,' an early hobby computer that had 256 bytes ram and was programmed in machine language. In 1980 I got my first real computer, a Tandy Color Computer. ... I was able to do a few musical things with that, and eventually bought a program for it that allowed four-track sequencing, with adjustable wave tables. I would then often run this output through the synthesizer, using its modules to add interest to the rather pure sounds from the computer.

"My first PC was an eight-bit DOS XT-clone laptop and did not have any sound capabilities other than a little piezo buzzer. I eventually found a MIDI interface that would work with it and a suitable piece of software so that I could start experimenting with MIDI around 1990. This program, SongWright, is a notation program, rather than a MIDI sequencer, but it does have a module that will read its proprietary file format and generate MIDI files. Many, maybe 60 percent, of the MIDI files on my site were sequenced using this program.

"In 1997 I got a Pentium Windows-based computer and, using the program 'Power Tracks Pro', sequenced the rest of my original transcriptions, and also edited and re-voiced many of the anonymous files I had collected from various sources."

So, for those with questions about MIDI files, from sounds to sequencing, post your question in the Vienna Residents Club and chances are Bill will have your answer.

That's about all the time for this month, but time at the PinWiz site is time well spent and highly recommended next time you're in GeoCities Vienna.