TLDR;
Music, like all of us, was all around me for most of my life, but I started to take a real interest at the age of 7. Up to my late-teens I found myself very interested in keyboards/piano, turntablism, valved brass instruments, 6-12 string guitar, bass guitar, drums/percussion, synth programming and singing and writing lead and harmony vocals.
The ‘other half’ of my musical interests including modular synthesis, designing/prototyping effect plugins (DSP), providing presets for a few of the major plugin manufacturers, and getting to grips with a few popular DAWs like Ableton and Logic and building familiarity with more unusual programs like Melodyne. As well as making music with clients, designing plugins, and generally keeping up with my playing skills, I am also a mentor for the amazing artists who enroll in the MAS Records artist development program.
THE LONG VERSION
My first music experience
The image you see is an old hi-fi from the early 80’s. This was my first instrument. Well, the record player was. I have vivid memories of the sight and sound of me playing Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” at different speeds. I also discovered I could touch the record without the motor running while the needle was in the groove, so I scratched my little heart out. My poor mother couldn’t deal with me doing this so I was bought a keyboard for my 7th birthday. We kept the record player until mum couldn’t deal with my 10 minute version of The Flying Pickets’ “Only You”.
Discovering the keyboard
This Bontempi reed organ was my first actual instrument. It made a lot of fan noise but it had 25 keys for me to get to grips with! I played along with the radio and things my mum would play on the stereo, I wanted to understand how this thing I had with the white and black keys related to the music I could hear. I’d already worked out my career; music transcription! I borrowed hymn and carol books from the CofE school I attended and remember asking Mrs Tugwell if I could play the assembly ‘singalong’ music one day. The song was “Morning Has Broken”, I was 7 and it went very well! I guess that was my first gig.
Euphonium and Tenor Horn
I joined the brass band at another school when I was 8, and they gave me a Euphonium (a half size tuba). It was HUGE for an 8 year old, and I had to lug it to school every Wednesday for rehearsals. I thought I was extremely cool. Moved school shortly after. One evening at Youth Club (remember those?) I spotted the local silver band in the school hall, so I knocked on the door and asked if I could join. They gave me a Tenor Horn, which is little bit smaller than a Euphonium, and was slightly easier to play. Being a member of this band was a lot of fun, and frequent rehearsals! On the gig menu were village fêtes and festivals, competitions and Christmas! Lots of things around Christmas time; standing or sitting around shopping centres, with fingerless gloves, occasionally being fed warming alcohol by my peers. The best part was getting up at 5am on Christmas morning to play joyous Christmas Carols between 6 and 8 am, much to the annoyance of some of the newer inhabitants of the village! “F*** OOOFFFF, I AM CALLING THE POLICE”. They called the police, the police arrived and we told them this was a tradition for almost 100 years and we weren’t going to stop. So we didn’t.
Since I had a band which took instructions (everybody was reading off score the whole time) I thought “can I make instructions?”, so I arranged a few pieces for them; The Muppet Show theme, ‘Allo ‘Allo (I think?), Hill Street Blues theme and a couple of things I’d written. It was a great challenge for an 11 year old me.
And then came computers
Since we lived next to our school, I was able to hang around afterwards and play in the music room or on the computers. The computers were BBC Masters and an Acorn Electron. A friend also had a few ZX Spectrums which I occasionally borrowed. These machines all had the ability to make sound and, as bleepybloopy everything was, I saw it as a challenge to get ‘music’ out of these things. I slowly built this idea of what separates ‘real instruments’ which you can touch and stroke, from this bleepybloopy thing described by numbers. Bleepybloops aren’t too far from the notes we read on the stave, so how far away was ‘expressive performance’ on a computer, I found myself asking myself.
Birthday Piano
We were not a wealthy family but my mum realised music was a big thing for me, so she bought a second-hand piano for my 9th birthday. This remains the best present I have ever received, and will always be. I could play whenever I pleased. And I did. We lived on a hippy commune and almost everything (and everyone) was ‘alternative’, so a piano teacher was going to be interesting. And it was. A teacher who taught the ‘Suzuki method’ was found and once a week she came to the community and spent an hour in the students’ houses. Traditional piano tuition has the target of being able to read the music on the page and to be able to play-what-you-see, while imparting your emotional interpretation of the music. Suzuki method wants you to be able to throw the music away (to remember your whole performance) and really play from your heart. This very much resonates with my sense of how music (and voices and instrumentalists who manipulate resonant structures) is unquestionably part of the fabric of our reality. Yeah, but I was only 10-11 by this point so it wasn’t a big thing.
4 Track Cassettes
That mad-looking machine in the photo is the Amstrad Studio 100; a combined 4-track/radio/twin-tape unit. A friend lent his to me so my (other) friend and I could record our album No!s (no exclamation marks) by The Vascular Bundles. Yes, we were students. The kit-list for that album is something like: Mustang electric guitar, Casio SK5, Spectrum Music Machine, original Stylophone, Yamaha PSR-27 and various terrible mics including the Stylophone, some baby monitors and those horrible things which came with the Amstrad 4-track.
“Hardcore hardcore, junglism junglism”
I left school at 16 and went to live on another commune, this time ‘run by young people’, apart from the accountant and legal ladies. The free-party movement had started and I stuck my toes in in 1992, becoming a follower of a group of freedom fighters called Exodus. My friends and I would wait in a car park behind the casino in Luton and wait for the truck with the red star on to turn up, honk it’s horn and lead us towards the illegally compromised (but usually entirely empty and unoccupied) venue for the night. The stack of speakers grew every attendance, and the bass definitely got deeper inside me. This kind of dance music has heavily influenced the choices I make, in music. I rebuilt one of the tapes we’d listen to on the way to these events. Here’s a digital rebuild of DJ Peshay PES01.
Trackers and Sequencers
A lot of the old rave music was made on trackers. A mate left an Amiga with me for a while and I had fun with Protracker and Octamed, both tracker-style sequencers. In 1998 IT work then took me to Germany. I had the fastest lump of laptop brick on the market and downloaded Jeskola’s Buzz, another tracker. A lot of that is on Bobby Beats 1. My interest in the different types of synthesis developed here. Lots of little developers chucking out their audio generation or manipulation ideas into the community. Kind of like the VST/AU plugin community today but much more ‘indie’ and all free! It was fun, but I wanted to record through microphones and cables, so I needed to improve things.
Logic on PC
I tested all the Windows DAWs on the market at the time, 2003, and ended up with Logic. Then Apple bought Emagic and it went Mac only. But I’d bought this awesome RAMBUS-based PC, so I moved to Ableton. And that’s where I stayed until 2014 when it just made sense to use Logic for professional and collaborative reasons.
Also, modular and plugin building
Around 2003 I also started looking at programs I could use to prototype plugin ideas. Reaktor, Max, SynthEdit and Sync Modular were all options but I ended up with Plogue’s Bidule. Since then I’ve made hundreds of sonic uglifiers and beautifiers, some of which are twists and extensions of effects we already know, and others are, or were when I built them, actual original ideas. I’ll slowly start documenting these as I try to find a way to turn the best ones into ‘real plugins’.
But always playing in bands
Playing with other musicians and conjuring up music out-of-nowhere is the most magical thing. At my core, I’m musician, but add on 30 years of producing music in computers and a technical interest in how and why the things we use to make it with work, and that’s me. I’ve always taught friends and family to play instruments, and involved nerdy coding mates in the more obtuse ideas; chord sequences from gradually mutating landscapes anybody? Whatever it is, if it’s making noises, I’m probably interested.
This is more than it looks
This is my phone and a Nintendo Wiimote controller sellotaped to my headphones. Using data from both devices I was able to create an immersive Ambisonic experience. It was purely an experiment to see if I could build Ambisonic en/decoders, then attaching them to real-world controllers. This was 2014, before, I believe, these kinds of controllers were available for the early Oculus Rift DevKit 1 and other consumer VR units. It worked perfectly, and I spent hours exploring Ambisonic recordings.
Preset Designer
After playing with hundreds of synths for thousands of hours you get ‘quite good’ at synthesis and eventually build a library of sounds carved by your own stiff wrists and sticky fingers. In the past few years I’ve made/enhanced presets for NI’s Massive and U-he’s Zebra2 and you’ll find them included in the default preset library.
Face, hair and front neck
This is a photograph of the upper quarter of my body. The face and hair you see here is the face and hair I use most days.