Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I started piano lessons when I was really young.
At a certain point, I realized that there wasn't a lot of difference
between the piano playing that I was doing and the way you kind of
make stuff on a keyboard and produce beats like the kind of music
that I was listening to, which I grew up listening to hip hop.
You know, I thought for a long time that I was going to end up
doing illustration for a living, and the band kind of took off.
I was offered the opportunity to play with computers and
technology at a pretty early age and get the opportunity to
mix those with my creative instincts.
After our first album was finished, we realized that we wanted to
turn around and do another album very quickly.
And we ended up gutting the back of one of our tour buses,
and the recording system that we needed to put in the bus
to be able to work was the size of a large, like a full size refrigerator.
It was massive.
Today I do better quality work.
It's higher resolution, It's more hard drive space,
and I could just do it on a laptop.
I can see a world where a computer like the XPS 27
is the center of the studio.
Flip your desktop computer down and really play with the surface.
I really am looking forward to what music application developers
can do with that device.
There wasn't a really great beginner music program for PC.
So we took what we knew about the software that I was using,
and turned it into StageLight, and made something that we feel
is really powerful and designed it in a way that
the user experience is simple.
To me, essentially recording and writing and mixing and
all those different parts of the process that are usually chronological
are actually just one thing all happening at the same time.
You know I'm not writing barely anything down,
I'm just like putting it into the computer and listening
and listening and listening, and as I hear things
that can be better, I tweak them.
It's so amorphous all the way to the very end.
I actually graduated with my Bachelor in Fine Arts and Illustration.
I was about to go into my last semester at Art Center.
We got the offer for a record deal and an album and all of that.
Of course the question came up, do we put our education on hold?
Everybody said "No, Let's make sure they understand
that we are going to finish college."
There's a whole intangible thing that goes on in a college environment.
You start to question and think about,
more about who you are and what you want to do
and what you can offer the world, you know.
If I'm not doing one creative thing, I've got to do other ones.
I kind of can't sit still when it comes to that.
If I'm not making something, I kind of go crazy.
I like to stay busy.