Musical Background

Discovering Music

My first memories of music must be my Mum giving me piano lesson's when I was about 7. Music flows freely in my blood stream as my Mum is a singer / pianist, my Nan still plays piano aged 90 and my late Gran was a church organist. I remember when I must have been about 10, listening to Jarre's Oxygene and Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, the Beatles, Peddler's, Boney-M etc. All my Dad's vinyl and tapes, quality!

I then progressed on to keyboard lessons with Chas Muir who was from a jazz background, learning left hand chord style for keyboard accompaniment. Chas had a Yamaha YS-200 sat on top of his organ which he let me play on special occasions!

Somehow, I ended up playing dodgy instrumentals of tunes like Guantanamera for Sunday lunch's in local hotels! For a time I had a partnership with Ross Purves who in an amazing musician, he played saxophone lead over my keyboards. Looking back on it, it was a all good fun and a good introduction to gigging and live music.

Exploring Music

Then the teenage band years, more Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Metalica, etc. Playing cover's in local pub's at 16 with various band's. We also got to play a few outdoor gigs which was cool. The photo to the right was me playing keyboards with a band called Dr.Frank in a marquee at Dartmouth College. Rock n Roll.

Sometime around there I got hold of an Atari 1040stfm and a copy of Steinberg Twelve which was a cut down version of Pro-24; the most common sequencing package at that time. That soon got superseded by the mighty Cubase v3.

My next step was performing arts at college, cool, but the big change happened from meeting a girl there! For she showed me raves, all night hardcore, dancing, lasers, future sounding, jungle technoism! I had found what I was looking for! Just before the scene died (1994), I ended up playing a live techno set at the Plymouth Warehouse for Enjoy Project, the reality was a very sketchy performance, and that's a long story, but it was a good night! (More about: Old Skool Rave)

At about the same time I discovered the album UFOrb. On headphone's the perfection of the engineering is really apparent and changed the way I listened to music. A great light shone from within the ultraworld, showing me the first step's that I should take towards the perfect mix.

In the later 1990's the internet then started opening up other channels of finding new music and labels like Warp had come to my attention. Electronic music had moved into a golden age with artists like Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, Boards of Canada, Plaid (to name just a few), all pioneering in someway and became a major influence on my musical directions.

Developing Music

In 1999 I did City & Guilds Sound Engineering at Combes Head college in Newton Abbot, great fun playing with 2" tape, microphones and a large Allen & Heath console. Also cool lectures and seminars including Fletcher Electro Acoustics who make Joe Meek kit.

Since then I've been gradually modernizing my home studio including moving it into a new extension we had built. I have become an avid collector of analogue synthesizers, but no longer a collector of digital synths since software plugins are adequate for the job. I've moved from an AtariST to a laptop with Ableton Live, enjoying the massive benefits of the modern software world.

So over the last few years I've had a lot to learn and had to develop a whole new method for writing music. I'm making big progress with the quality of engineering and hope to release some new music sometime during 2011, watch this space ;)