Since 1969, as lead singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and
vocal and musical arranger with Friz Necessity, Sun, Emrys, Topaz,
The Fusionauts,The Campers From Hell,
and Crime Control, all of whom professionally recorded original
material and performed live club and concert dates in a wide variety
of styles, I know what you're going through......Nuff said.
From an early age I developed a strong fascination with gadgetry and
all things technical. After receiving my diploma in Computer
Technology in '79, (and having already spent ten years in the
musical trenches) I began providing for myself by days by fixing and
programming computers for accounting firms. By nights, between
gigs, songwriting, and rehearsals, I went about the arduous task of
trying to merge my two loves, music and computers, which back then
involved breadboards, jumper wires, modular synthesizers, and long
lists of program code, until one day along came MIDI. AAAHHH, big
sigh of relief as all of this type of work suddenly became extremely
easy and straightforward.
So! In 1985 I opened Incidental Sounds, Co. and began helping
songwriters to create finished works of musical art. Since then the
technology has advanced by leaps and bounds. With digital
recording, hard disk editing..... the list goes on and on, we have
witnessed a revolution in the ability of a project studio to compete
with the quality of the majors to the point where a large percentage
of current radio hits are produced in facilities like ours. Over
4,000 songs later, and we're still going strong, and in each one of
those songs I've learned new tricks to help improve the finished
results.
Knowing how to utilize the technology to its fullest is imperative,
but, in and of itself, is useless without the musical knowledge to
go with it. The main reason songwriters return here year after year
is because of the help they get "creating" their songs. Music is
the most powerful way known to humanity to transmit pure emotion
from one person into another, and knowing how best to perform and
arrange is the requirement to put the emotion into the music.