But first, some history.

Our studio had a humble beginning. A very humble beginning. I first began making electronic music with a Yamaha PSR37 (NB: that's not me in the video) hooked up to an Atari Mega ST2, running Steinberg Pro Twenty-Four.

The PSR was no good for anything other than dire synth music. Not even synth pop - just electronic arse-music. So I soon replaced it with my first synth - a Yamaha SY22. I loved this synth, and it opened up a whole new world of sound creation, etc. However, I just continued making awful music with the SY22's presets...


I made a few tunes with a school chum called Steve Kielty (continuing the 'link everything' theme, I wonder if it's this Steve Kielty?). We listened to hardcore and wrote bad imitations. There was one tune we wrote that used a specific patch from one of his keyboards - on the strength of this one sound (Shakuhachi), I bought one for myself. A Roland U20.


So now I had two very different keyboards, a wealth of sounds, and so I started writing more filmic, atmospheric stuff. The problem with this set up was beats - nothing I had so far made any decent drum noises. So the next addition to the studio had to be a sampler. I bought a second-hand Akai S01 and thus began the real start of my musical journey.


Since sample CDs were expensive, and the Internet was still called 'books', I relied on the Future Music cover CDs as the source of my samples. As a result, I would write in whatever style that particular month's CD had samples of. One month it was jungle breaks, the next edition would be pop-funk, etc.


About this time, Tricky won the Mercury prize with Maxinquaye, while Portishead's Dummy and Earthling's Radar were never off my CD player. This was the first time a musical genre had ever wholly captivated me. I started writing trip-hop-esque tunes (including the original version of our very own Music Box), bought one more sound module (a Yamaha TG55 - again, off the strength of one or two patches - Modomatic and St.Michael) and the studio in this guise would be the basis of my studio for a good while to come.



The original studio kit list in full:


Atari Mega ST2
Steinberg Pro Twenty-Four III
Yamaha SY22
Roland U20
Yamaha TG55
Akai S01
Sudiomaster Diamond Club 16-2 mixing desk
Hitachi Stereo


AFTERTHOUGHT: I've just read this post back - this is what I meant when I said that this blog might end up a bit of a geeky vanity project. Hopefully in my next post, I will waffle less and maybe say something interesting!