I have worked with audio on computers longer than I have actually played any nstrument. It all began when my roommate Tom Purcell showed me a cool program called Fruity Loops. This was 1998 in Athens, Ga. I had already downloaded Propellerhead's Recycle demo and quickly grew bored with it. There's only so much you can do with a few patterns and a simple 909 emulator. Especially when you can't save. But Fruity Loops 1.0 was something special. You could take any sound sample and place it virtually anywhere you wanted. Creating patterns was a breeze with their "see-it-all" interface and organizing those patterns into a simple song was similarly trivial. The coolest thing was that we could save our work since Tom had bought the program online with lifetime upgrades. At 99 bucks, that's one of the best software deals ever as the program has come a long way since the 1.0 days.

I've been fortunate to live around musicians and be exposed to great music since my days in Athens. I take that back. My mom raised me in an environment awash with music. We had a piano at the house that she would often play. I was amazed by little ditties like Moonlight Sonata and Fur Elise. I took piano lessons once but never stuck with it. Plus we listened to a great deal of golden oldies on car trips as we travelled the country. Beach music and Motown hits were the primary staples but I listened to my fair share of the Dirty Dancing soundtrack as well : )

I took piano lessons as a child but never stuck with it. It wasn't until I heard DJ Shadow's Organ Grinder on University of Georgia's legendary WUOG 90.5 that I really realized how powerful and varied music could be. I bought Endtroducing and fell in love with its intricately woven layers. It seemed each time I listened to it I found something new to marvel at. And it was made with just a mixer, turntables, a sampler, a vcr and an 8track? Amazing! I began to surround myself with musicians. My friend Naveen Pogula showed me some basic guitar chords with some R.E.M. songs. At the time, we lived across the street from the church where the group first got together. Even though all that remained was the steeple, there was an electricity in the air when you traversed the railroad trestle over the Oconee behind our apartment building. You knew that years ago, many young musical legends had done the same thing, experiencing the beauty of discovery and possibility.

I later moved down the street to live with Tom and Jared the next year. Tom had a guitar and Jared Tolla had an acoustic bass. I picked the instruments up from time to time but never really learned to play that well. I spent more time freaking sounds in Fruity Loops and going to shows. I was convinced that my fingers could not possibly contort to play much of anything on a stringed instrument and sort of gave up.

In the years between then and now, I've continued to explore music and hang with the musically inclined. In 2000, I moved in to the house I'm currently staying at. I joined my friends Kenneth Gambill and Phil Stockman. They moved to Atlanta from Virginia because their college pal (and superb drummer) Scotty Bryan had migrated south and it seemed like a good environment for music. They started the band Homeroom in the basement. Phil worked at Guitar Center at the time and recruited work chum Adam Youngblood as a bassist. Adam brought his old friend Josh Keen along as a keyboardist. When they weren't practicing, I would collaborate with various folk making loony tunes in Acid, FruityLoops and Nuendo in the rudimentary basement studio.

As Homeroom moved on out of the house, continually improving their sound and presence, another Guitar Center employee by the name of Cary West took up residence. Actually, when he moved in he was working at Wizrd Electronics, a music repair shop behind the Atlanta Guitar Center. He was a GC alum but wound up going back to work up their corporate ladder. He taught me a great deal about recording principles. I helped him out with computer issues. At this point, I had begun working extensively with Apple Computers and Propellerheads Reason 2.0. I was working at an open-access multimedia computer lab at Georgia State University called the Digital Aquarium, teaching classes in ProTools and Reason.

It wasn't until several years later that I began to play an instrument seriously. Actually, it was about a year ago. A co-worker and buddy at Georgia State's Digital Media Group, Matthew Munson, gave me an old electric bass. A 1960 Gibson SG actually. It was nice to finally have a decent instrument so I started to pick it up. I had another Guitar Center employee as a roommate. This guy had just finished luthier school (building guitars, not lutes) out in Snellville and was going insane stuck out in suburbia. I happened to need someone to split the rent since Cary moved on to manage a store in Alabama.

Ben Calhoun turned out to be a font of knowledge for all things guitar. He had built guitars and pedals and knew all manners of scales and inversions and tricky jazz shit I didn't even know had names. He also had a loop pedal. One night after catching local post-math-whatever-they-just-rock band the Partisan at 10 high, I came home with the realization that I could craft tunes by looping bass melodies over bass rhthym. I filled his pedal up with loops when the even greater realization struck me: I could build the same loops in ProTools and add Reason drum loops and guitar to boot.

Since then, I've recorded a wide range of material in a sort of audio diary. After work, I'd come home and work on a Reason file, or build something in ProTools. Most of the project titles are simply the date. A lot of it is crap, on account of me not being the most technically proficient instrumentalist I know. But there are a number of gems and you can check some of it out here. I will post more of the work in the coming weeks.

Right now, I'm living with Josh Keen, ex-keyboardist for Homeroom and future behind-the-scenes ghettocrunk superstar. Whereas I have dozens of half-finished songs and scores of simple song seeds, Josh has the tenacity and skill to knock out well-polished tracks that deserve to be thumping in clubs worldwide. Studio partner (and current Homeroom drummer) Terry Walker brings his considerable skills as a rythymaster to the mixing block in what we refer to as the KAVE. He has also been gracious enough to provide our little studio with You can hear some of the latest stuff here. For another taste of what type of production we offer, check out the spacejazzy sounds of The KAVE project here.

When I started writing this post, I intended to provide a simple summary of my musical background. It seems like I got a little carried away but in truth, I'm only scratching the surface. Old memories kept popping into my head as I tried to stay concise. And many important characters are conspicuously absent from this broad overview. For instance, I haven't even mentioned my brother's brilliant work as a singer/songwriter. Well, that's just one person out of many.

The point is, I have a passion for working with sound and what expertise I don't personally possess is readily available to me through my close friends. As this site develops, I'll introduce you to many of my inflluences, provide informative tutorials and share both audio tracks and raw files for you to work with or simply enjoy. I want to make this my business and I think I am well-qualified. More importantly, the group of people I'm friends with are as knowledgeable and passionate as I am. We'll definitely be making waves in the future.