And So It Begins...

Taking the first step is always the hardest, as they say. This will be my first attempt at blogging. I intend for this to be a journal of my activities in my home midi studio.

I'm an Electrical Engineer by training and practiced for the first 10 years of my career after college. Early in my engineering career I became involved in a project that required programming a microprocessor. This was back in the early 80's when assembly language programming was very much a "black art". Through a fortuitous twist of fate, the task of figuring out how to program the microprocessor fell to me. This sent me on a trek for the next ten years of learning successively more complicated processors and programming them. This, in turn,  led me to the IT profession where I work today as the Director of Technology for a mid-sized company in Tennessee.

I have always been attracted to music that was well engineered technically. Recording engineers like Alan Parsons, Roger Nichols and Bob Clearmountain have well earned reputations for producing some of the most sonically precise music in the business. Albums like Steely Dan's Gaucho, Alan Parsons Ammonia Avenue and Roxy Music's Avalon stand as monuments to these monsters of recording engineering. I have always enjoyed understanding the technology that is employed to record and mix that music. This is partially what drove me to embrace and understand Midi and ended up sending me off on a course of exploring electronic music more deeply.

My musical interests  have always leaned toward Techno - even before it was called Techno. I remember back in the 1970's being attracted to artists like [then knows as] Walter Carlos, Isao Tomita, Mike Oldfield and Keith Emerson. As the Techno landscape began to stratify into it's many genres in the 80's and 90's I was attracted to primarily two of them: Ambient and Trance. Some of my favorite techno artists are Hybrid, The Crystal Method, Deadmou5, Daft Punk, Paul van Dyk, Armin van Buuren and John Digweed

I have always had some sort of musical composition space in my home. At times it has been more modest that it is now, but its always been there. About 2 years ago I began the conversion of one of the rooms in my house into a dedicated studio space. This has evolved over time into a very well equipped home midi studio.

My next few posts will detail the construction and features of my studio. Stay tuned...