VIRB

I thought it would be a good introduction to my music to write a brief history of how i got into it.

It all started at school, aged 14. We had to do some optional subject and i liked music so "Music Technology" sounded like fun. This was in 1992, so the school was ahead of it's time in that respect. They showed us how MIDI keyboards and sequencers worked. Cubase was what they had running on the computers, but it was just a super basic sequencer at this time, no VST yet. After a few lessons of messing around (the teacher barely knew more than us, and by the end of the course probably less) I had figured out how to load samples into an Akai S01 and record the notes and play them back. I also figured out that the samples didn't have to be tonal notes, but could be any sound at all. At the time I was into rock and grunge. Led Zeppelin, Soundgarden, Sonic Youth etc. Therefore applications of this new found technology didn't really spring to mind, but I did leave with the feeling that studios were cool and nothing to be afraid of.

I went on to do an art foundation course (1995) and it achieved what it was supposed to, mainly breaking down most of my preconceptions about art (and indirectly music) and opening my mind up to new ideas. I also very quickly fell out of love with rock and got into music of a more electronic persuasion. Orbital, Biosphere and various others were filing my head (also a lot of goa trance, but the less said about that the better) and I think even from the very start the fact that I knew roughly how this sort of music was constructed help me form mental images of tracks I wanted to produce.

When i got to university to do a Design & Art Direction degree we were encouraged to do all manner of multimedia projects including sound and video. To my joy i discovered that they had a small studio with an Akai S01 and a mac running Cubase. From that point onwards there was no stopping me, although the setup at the college was both liberating and extremely constrictive. You had to book a day in the studio weeks in advance, pretend to be from another department, then suffer a day of constant interuptions and zero technical support.

All this led to me getting an Akai S3000XL of my own. A beast of a machine, and cutting edge for the time. I was out of college and working before i paid off the loan for it. I ran it from a PC laptop running good old cubase. I would spend many a day and evening hunched over the little screen, twiddling with samples while my girlfriend (now wife) watched TV or played Diddy Kong Racing and Banjo Kazooie. My major musical influences from this time (and to this day) were DJ Shadow and Amon Tobin. I realised from listening to their music that a rich source of samples was essential, so I started collecting vinyl obscurities to plunder for sounds. I'm still a crate digger to this day and as I'm quite open minded about music I find buying and listening to unusual music is almost a hobby in itself, seperate from making music. I worte my dissertation on bricolage theory too, so it all tied in nicely.

After I left college I continued to make tunes on the Akai while starting a career in graphics. In restrospect I wasted a lot of time trying to make drum&bass floorfillers, which I think I did well at in many respects, but to be honest you need very specific equipment to make good d&b (mainly a very large club-like way of monitoring the mixes) so they kinda sucked. Me and my friend Tom Miller (DJ Central) got a few cut onto dubplates at the Music House in London. An exciting but ultimately futile experience.

The next major evolution in my music was software. I had a G4 Mac (another loan that took 5+ years to pay back) for doing freelance graphics and video stuff, and someone gave me a copy of Reason 1.0. It took about a month for me to ditch the Akai (I stil have it though.. it's propping my amp up). Despite the considerable limitations of Reason 1.0, for anyone who was a veteran of hardware samplers, the freedom it gave to get ideas out of one's head quickly and accurately was unbelievable.

About 5 years ago I started to get into funk. Not 70's disco spawn, but late 60's early 70's deep south hard and minimal funk. Me and Tom started a night DJing it and had a great time. Great music free beer plus getting paid. A win win situation. So in the last few years I've been making some tracks that fall into that category. Quite a departure from my earlier stuff, but I distinguish it by recording under different names. Pulpito is for anything experimental and jazz-like, Kaitain is for Hip-hop type creatings and Rattlebag is for the funk.

I currently use Reason 2.5 and Live 6 to make music. For anything with live instruments (I play guitar and flute) I use Live, for anything straight from samples I use Reason.