Growing up, I was exposed to a wide variety of musical influences. I grew up listening to groups like the Beatles, Queen and The Rolling Stones to Willie Nelson, John Denver and various classical productions. One of my favorite memories was trying to get my parents semi-functional CD player to play Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Honkey Tonk Women or I Am The Walrus. Growing up, in high-school I grew into bands like Metallica and Filter.

Then in 1998, I heard two albums that changed my whole musical taste, Dig Your Own Hole, by the Chemical Brothers and The Downward Spiral, by Nine Inch Nails. From that point on, I knew that this was the kind of music I wanted to hear. I had always been fascinated by electronic musical elements of songs like In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins and wanted to explore how they were made. This new genre a of music “techno” was amazing to me. All of the sounds I loved in one place; drums, synthesizers, robotic voices. Along with listening, I wanted to create these sounds, to experiment and build, to learn what made things sound one way or another.

As more and more bands broke into the genre, or as I became more aware of them, I found more groups that playes the sound that I like. The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, Massive Attack all became part of my personal soundscape. In the winter of 1998 I bought my first keyboard a Yamaha DJX. I had had a small Casio growing up and while playing with the electronic rhythms, breaks and fills had been fun, this was something completely new. It wasn’t a great keyboard, but it made sounds that I liked, more synthy and dance oriented. It had a remix section that allowed you to take a multi-part drum loop and mute or filter individual pieces, and it had a rudimentary sampler.

In 1999, when I graduated from high-school, I went to my first concert. I saw The Low-Fidelity All Stars, Crystal Method, and Orbital (having never heard them before) in Worcester at the Palladium. It was amazing, sitting on the balcony in the shadows of the pan/scan gobos feeling the whole floor shake when the music stopped because the bass was so deep and powerful. I knew at that moment, I needed to produce that kind of sound. About two weeks later, I bought my first analog modeling synthesizer, a Korg Electribe AE-1. I was able to build my own synthesizer sounds now. I also purchased a used Korg DDD-5

In my freshman year of college, I continued to play around with this, experimenting as well with ACID looping/production software and Sound Forge. There were several other pieces of equipment that had caught my attention over the year, including the venerable Roland MC-505. Towards the late fall of 1999, I heard about a new groove-box system by Yamaha called the RM1x. It allowed for full MIDI sequencing and all in one box production. To buy this piece of equipment, I regrettably had to sell my Korg EA-1. But now I owned a complete sequencing tool. Production increased as did my excuses for not doing school work but eventually a balance was achieved.

Towards the end of my sophomore year, I was looking for a full size keyboard. The little keys on the RM1x just weren’t cutting it. The new board coming out, that looked promising, from features and creativity, was the Korg Karma. I bought the Karma on my 20th birthday with a dance voice expansion and free case. This was my primary composing and sequencing tool going forward. The Karma was unique because it was the first digital keyboard to incorporate the KARMA engine, a revolutionary MIDI filter and sequencing tool, capable of creating sounds and sequences that could accurately mimic live acoustic performance as well as amazing electronic sounds; all in real time with real-time controls and modifiers. Just after buying this, I also bought another EA-1, because, simple as it was, it was that good at what it did.

While the Karma had an amazing sound engine with great samples and much more flexibility than before, it didn’t offer the same control and “tweakability” as the EA-1. Problem with the EA-1 was that it didn’t offer more than one note at a time, chords were out of the question. After graduation in 2003 I parted ways with my second EA-1, again regrettably, along with the ER-1, but with a significant upgrade in their place – the Access Virus A.

Going forward, the Virus became my go-to synth for everything. Leads, pads, bass. I could make almost any sound I wanted by twisting a knob and pressing a button. And the sounds were thick, they were the closest thing to real analog I could get for the money and I loved it. Of all my equipment, sonically it is the most versatile piece of hardware I own. I would miss it greatly and even if I upgrade to another Virus, I will keep this.

With the Virus in hand, I was able to make sounds more quickly and easily than I had been able to before. I started integrating my rag-tag studio into a unit that would function as a whole instead of individual pieces working independently. I have always been guilty of focusing on one piece of equipment at a time, using it to the exclusion of others. Now I started using the big ones all together, the Karma, RM1x and Virus. Several songs came from this, Evolution Bleep, Synapse and Industry. The same problems that had plagued me throughout this whole process kept coming back to haunt me though. The RM1x had internal memory for X number of notes and could store fairly complex songs. The Karma had memory for sounds, but no memory for sequences or songs. Both systems use 3.5″ floppy disks as backups. On several occasions, I have lost data and had to try to recover or re-write entire compositions because of a disk failure. Most notably this happened once in college with a song that I loved, never recorded it and accidentally lost power during saving the song, erasing it completely.

In light of this limitation, I had always kept my eye on the music program Reason by Propellerhead, an all in one music studio with various synthesizers, samplers, effects, etc… Reason won’t sequence MIDI to external equipment though, so I was hesitant to use it since all of my sounds were made outside of my computer. In the summer of 2007 I took the digital plunge and invested in a Motu UltraLite audio interface and Digital Performer music software. I had never used Digital Performer, or any audio/MIDI sequencing application before, and I think I bit off more than I could chew at the time. I still don’t use it often, because it is not very user friendly. I spent one day going over and over the manuals trying to figure out why nothing was displaying in the program when I knew I had recorded 5 minutes of sound and sequence information. There was a keyboard command I didn’t know about that I had accidentally turned on that hides all data to simplify the view that brought me to a screeching halt. That said, the program does work, but I still have not tapped into it deeply enough yet to fully realize it’s potential.

About six months after buying this equipment, Reason came out with a major update and released Version 4. This was a tipping point for me. In version 4, they unveiled the Thor synthesizer, a virtual analog synthesizer that could match sound design capabilities of the Virus, but with more flexibility, sound sources, and modulation options. In the winter of 2008 I bought Reason 4 and have never looked back.

Most recently, I purchased Ableton Live and hope to use that in place of DP as a bridge between my hardware and software. I like the real time control and flexibility that this package offers along with the ability to be very experimental in a cool, creative way. Plus you can DJ with it, you can’t go wrong! Also for DJ work, I use Native Instruments Traktor Duo digital DJ system.