Me & My Music

Music is my life, I owe my life to music. It has provided the soundtrack to my nights out and it has been my companion through the good times and the bad. It has consoled me when I have been lonely or depressed and has also been my chosen method of therapy when I have needed release from the stresses of my life. It was also been my constant inspiring force that has been my only true consistant focus throughout my life.

One of my earliest memories is when my late grandmother bought me a personal radio as a birthday present. I would spend hours on end with the earphones plugged in exploring the wide range of music being played. I would listen religeously to the Top 40 each Sunday afternoon and I observed the musical styles evolve through the eighty's, ninety's and now into the noughty's.

During my year out from my university studies, while working the drudgery of a full time office job, I managed to save up the £600 to get my first laptop powerful enough to write music. I obtained a copy of EJAY and starting composing tracks using the safe but limited sequencing tools available. Soon after I was writing drum and melody loops using Fasttracker, a very versatile tracker program, and sequencing them into tracks using Cool Edit Pro. Over the next year I spent a great amount of my time experimenting on my music and exploring a variety methods of making sounds and beats using the wide variety of freeware tools at hand including many freeware software synthesisers that were available for different purposes. Although I have never learnt to play a musical instrument, I found myself becoming very adept in what I viewed one of the most versatile musical instruments ever created - my laptop.

Soon before finishing my second year of studies I had composed enough tracks that I was happy to release to publish my first album, "Introspection". I sold copies of this album to friends and people I met, and thus funded my drinking for the remainder of my student daze.

After the release of Introspection, I continued experimenting and composing loops but with my studies taking up more and more of my time I had less time to spend on what I'd prefer to have done. However it was during this time that the seeds of "Tao", "Contemplation", and "Tribal Jazz" (then called "Saxy Beat") were sewn.

Due to technical difficulties my music came to a dead halt shortly after I graduated. Tragically the computer that I was using started playing up severely and I was unable to use it for anything but the most basic tasks. Fortunately I was able to rescue most of the files, but there a couple of tracks which sadly have been lost for ever. It was very upsetting not to be able to release my emotions into my music, but I did write quite a lot of lyrics and ideas during this time which I guess I used as a different release method.

After several months saving up, while being employed in another soul destroying office job, I managed to replace my laptop with a much further upgraded one that also had a very useful CD writer. I gradually got back into rhythm of making music again. I have since then finished almost enough tracks to comprise my next album.

One of the tracks near completion, Murphy's Law, was inspired from a recording I made at the very point my life started to be redirected with a view to making a career out of music. The vocal samples used throughout this track were recorded while I was being sacked from my most recent (and hopefully last) office job. I was sacked from a flexi-time company for being 3 minutes behind on my time sheet. Though I had put in 11 months loyal service, the company realised they might have to pay me what I was worth as I was performing duties well over and above my job description. To avoid this they instead sacked me, just one month before I could have taken them to a tribunal for doing just that. For some strange and hugely unfair reason, employees in this country have virtually no rights at all until they have been in a job for more than a year!!!

I am hoping to release "The Way Of Tao" in mid-2005. This will be available for only £8. To keep up to date with any news, please add your email address to my mailing list.