From a very young age I remember my mother listening to classical music. She always used to tell me the story the music was evoking - Peer Gynt, Peter and the Wolf, the Pastoral symphony, Rites of Spring, Fingal's Cave, Swan Lake, the 1812 - each becoming as familiar to me as the tales she told.
This weaving of stories and music, and the arrangements and instrumentation and pictures conjured up by each piece, has stayed with me ever since.
As the family grew up - I had an elder brother, two elder sisters and a young brother - I became exposed to a diverse and ever changing series of musical influences from the great musicals, Fiddler on the Roof, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Porgy and Bess - to the huge creative bloom of the 60's and 70's as technology allowed access to some to that symphonic texturing in more contemporary music - from the Beatles to Tamla Motown, from the Small Faces to ELP, from Jimi Hendrix to Heatwave and on - the sheer diversity of influences was massive and the multi-layered possibilities of multi-tracking and the rise of electronic synthesis created whole new genres. But the profusion of styles and genres all had roots back to the symphonic idea of sound used to paint pictures that told a story.
I inevitably fell in love with those bands and musicians whose virtuosity of playing and arranging seemed to link most directly to this classical influence, and so my heroes were Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson, Chick Churchill, Patrick Moraz and the like - terribly unfashionable to admit to these days but they were deeply influential.
Unfortunately, I didn't get around to learning to play an instrument with any degree of seriousness until I was in my late 20's but, some 10 years earlier, I had discovered a way to simulate some of that symphonic texturing and to emulate some of the articulation of real instruments through the use of synthesis.
I bought and built my first music synthesiser in 1978. I began engineering in 1982/83 under the tutelage of Tom Newman, engineer and producer of Tubular Bells. I bought my first digital sampling musical instrument in 1984 (Emulator 1) and later that year became a partner in my first 24-track studio based in the City of London. I began producing in the mid to late 80's - though I should say that I was not terribly good at that time - I so wanted to be the artist, not the back room boy; still, we live and learn and learn I did.
After some years as a jobbing engineer, sometime producer and very much in demand programmer I became more and more involved with the manufacturers of electronic musical instruments helping to test, define and finally design some of the most significant and powerful instruments and technologies available. I did this from the point of view of a frustrated musician and of a jobbing engineer, producer and programmer who wanted the functionality to allow me to quickly emulate all the sounds and articulations that would make the instruments more believable and organic when played and that captured the performance and nuance of real instruments when recorded.
In the early 90's I was fortunate to be able to move to Gloucestershire. I was fed up with living in London and the music industry was really banal at the time and I was looking for a new direction. Some friends of mine had a multimedia company and for some while I had written music for some of their products. They asked for help with some audio processing for a multimedia product they were working on and I ended up moving to Gloucestershire and working for them for a few years.
By this time I had a mountain of musical gear, which I put into the space I had at their offices, and whilst working for them they asked me to write introductory music for all their products. Because the gear was set up, and because I was living in such idyllic country, I began to compose more and more and experiment with different styles. At the time my ability as a producer was growing and my technical ability as both an engineer and a programmer of musical technology far exceeded my ability as a musician. Thus, I began to experiment with different ways of emulating or simulating a degree of virtuosity that I did not possess. I have improved as a musician since then but the results of these experiments led into many interesting areas and finally to composing for film and television as well as theatre and live performance.
The tracks you hear on this site are some of the experiments and some of the musical commissions I have undertaken and represent, for the most part, are instrumental tending toward pastoral or classical in influence.
I continue to work in many genres and have another site where my more contemporary compositions and projects are aired - www.myspace.com/theartofmix
I hope you like the tracks which I shall be updating periodically.
Thanks for visiting!
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