I started playing the piano out of boredom.  When I was but a wee lad, my family would go to visit the grandparents in Sundance for holidays, and there wasn't much to do there at times.  So I would head out to their enclosed porch and bang away on the piano.  The porch wasn't heated, and the piano was out of tune, but I was too wrapped up in playing to care.  I found that I could easily play songs I had heard on the radio by listening to them and repeating what I heard.  And I also started to create my own little chord progressions and such.  After several holidays doing this my songs became more involved and I quickly started to write more parts than I had hands with which to play them.  I used my boom box to record one part while I played the other part live, but that quickly became frustrating.  Therefore I made my brothers bang out a few notes that I'd show them while I tried to play in time with them.  That quickly became even more frustrating.

Before long, my grandparents decided to move the piano to our house, since they never played it, and that's all I was doing when I was over there.  At this point, somewhere around age 13 or 14, I started working on my songs on a daily basis.  I was still finding it difficult to realise the songs I was creating because they were too complex for me to play all at once, and I wanted more than just piano sounds.  I was given a keyboard and software for the family's Commodore 64 computer that allowed me to create songs using a three track sequencer.  The main drawback to the system was that you only had three voices to play with, so if one track was playing a three-note chord, there was nothing left for the other tracks.  However, I still wrote some Bach-type counterpoint stuff that helped me get the hang of multitrack sequencing.  My experiments with that ended one day when I plugged the keybboard in while the program was loading (Commodore 64 programs could take a LOOONNGG time to load sometimes) and I ruined the disk by sending a spark through the joystick port.

It was about this time that I decided to spend the money on a synth that would allow me to create some more complex sequences.  I saved up for what seemed like eons, and in April 1992, during my senior year in high school, I bought a brand-new ENSONIQ SD-1 at a music store in Rapid City, SD (top keyboard in the picture).  What an awesome keyboard!  Click here to read my review of this unit at Harmony-Central.  I wrote a TON of music on this synth and continue to use it in my studio today.  The song "The Magic Pool" is one of the earliest songs I did on this keyboard, and it appears in it's original, unedited form on the CD Initial Attraction.  When you hear this song on the CD, it is exactly how the keyboard sounded, there are no overdubs or edits.  All I did was press "record" on the computer, then "play" on the keyboard to play back the sequence.  Some songs on the CD Eternal Desire, including "New Year" and "Crossroads," are also this keyboard "solo."  This keyboard has been my therapist since 1992, with no trouble, except for a broken key switch one time in 1993 from me abusing it during a gig.  (I spent a year playing local bars with the band Fatal Attraction, where I played Keys, Bass and a little bit of 6 string guitar, as well as backing vocals).

After a while, I found myself wanting more sounds and polyphony, and in 1996 I heard some demos of ENSONIQ's latest workstation, the MR61 (bottom keyboard in picture).  I immediately fell in love with the sounds and decided I would someday get one.  Finally in May of 1999 I bought a used MR61 on ebay and have been absolutely delighted with it.  I love the way this keyboard sounds, I love how it looks, and I love how it works.  It is an awesome synth! Click here to read my review of the MR61 at Harmony-Central.  This keyboard sounds so good that I use it for about 90% of the sounds on my more recent songs.  Several songs on my CD Eternal Desire are done entirely on the MR61, including the title track, as well as "Missing You" and "Her Name."

With two keyboards, I quickly found the need for a mixer, so I have added a Mackie CR1604-VLZ mixer, JBL 4206 monitors and a home-made PC to my studio setup, which gives me complete multitrack capabilities with the SAW software package.