It’s Deja Vu All Over Again

In 1983, I was a sophomore in high school, dreaming of entering the music business as a synthesizer nerd and computer enthusiast. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford any of the good sound gear and my keyboard skills were (and still are) marginal at best. As a result, I ended up as a software engineer for forty years because while making music didn’t pay, writing code did. Now that technology has made it possible for frustrated musicians like me to make decent sounding noises without having nimble fingers, I’m returning to my first love

My exposure to electronic music started early; my father, a CPA by trade, built pipe organs in his youth and continued working on them for his entire life. What I didn’t know was that my father was always looking for the next interesting thing in musical instruments, and he had bought a copy of Wendy Carlos’ landmark album, “Switched On Bach” the week it went on sale. I heard that album for the first time in 1972, when I was six years old, living in the Los Angeles suburb of San Pedro. It left a lasting impression; I still recall running around the house, dancing to the music of the third movement of the third Brandenburg Concerto as it played through a Dynakit tube amplifier. Later on as an adolescent and then teenager, the personal computer revolution gave me the opportunity to try a few things I’d been itching to do.

As a computer guy, digital generation of sound was always my goal. The 8-bit home computers I could afford didn’t have the horsepower to do a great deal, but they could at least keep my appetite whetted. I acquired a copy of Hal Chamberlain’s classic, “Musical Applications of Microprocessors”, and started by creating versions of Hal’s BASIC code that would run on a Commodore-64. After that, I started writing adaptations in 6502 assembly code. Despite the comparative high performance of machine code, it still took hours to do things like inverse FFTs. Switching to a Televideo portable computer with a Z80 processor didn’t help a lot (the 6502 is a very efficient processor despite its limitations). I needed faster machines, but couldn’t afford things like a PDP-11 — which was capable of running a single digital oscillator in real-time at a 22 Khz sample rate. I could only drool over things like the Fairlight CMI (introduced in 1979), or the EMU Emulator. The Ensoniq Mirage, introduced in 1984, just before I graduated high school, gave me hope that I might someday be able to afford a real synthesizer that could play any sound I chose to build.

As the years rolled on and computers got more and more powerful, I kept writing code for search engines and information retrieval systems, dreaming still of owning a real workstation. In the early 2000’s, I was finally able to buy a couple of my dream instruments via eBay — though a Fairlight still eluded me. I managed to find a Kawai K5000 at a rock bottom price, sold by a guitarist who just couldn’t deal with an additive synthesis machine that had some 1,500 parameters per patch. Later, I managed to find an Ensoniq Mirage, and I picked up some vintage ROMplers. Enter the 2020’s, and software reproductions of all the classics. Thanks to engineers at places like Arturia, I can now fiddle with a Synclavier and a Fairlight, or a DX-7. Wavetables, once the playground for wealthy musicians who could afford a PPG or a Waldorf Wave, could be had for less than $500 as software plugins like Arturia’s “Pigments” or the Korg “Modwave”. After playing with a lot of these replicas and the follow-on products they inspired, it became clear that while I was an aspiring musician still, what I really enjoyed was designing new sounds from scratch as tools for other musicians. This echoes my career in software development, where I’ve focused on building things like episodic memories that others can use in areas like search technology and artificial intelligence.

That leads to this new website and new company, which I started in late 2024 as a family business along with my kids, who are all musically or technologically inclined. We’re all learning and there’s still a long way to go before we approach being a “professional” company, but one has to start somewhere. Our focus is going to be on developing new sounds through bespoke in-house software, sound design by request, EDM, and a few hardware projects related to resurrecting additive synthesizers in the spirit of the Kawai K5000, Kurzweil K250 and the Crumar Synergy (famously used by Wendy Carlos). The latter will be implemented using ARM-based platforms that consume as little power as possible while providing good performance; we have some designs in mind.

Thanks for taking the time to read this bit of babbling, and I hope to have you as a customer and a contributor. We’re always looking for suggestions for new sources of sounds, as well as feedback on what sorts of sounds you might be looking for. If there’s a way we can engineer it, we’ll look at doing it!