I was always interested in music and sound. I don't know how to begin this story. It goes back to when I was a kid. There are key moments and key people.

One year for Christmas, my parents bought me a computer program called Power Tracks Pro. This was in the days before the modern DAW had taken over, Cakewalk was a new thing at this time, if that means anything to you. Pwer Tracks Pro was very simple midi multitracking program, and I had a keyboard, I think it was a Concertmante brand, but it had MIDI on it. So this was my first real attempt at multitracking. However them only computer in the house was the family computer. I didn't have my own computer in my bedrrom studio. So while I would play around with Power TRacks, moving my keyboard into the other room and back again was bit combersome. In my room I had an Audio boombox for playing CDs, and it had two cassette tape decks and an audio input. This is really how I got started with the idea of layering tracks on each other. I would reaocrd onto one cassete and then put that cassette in the deck B, then I would record onto a new tape in Deck A, while Deck B was playing also, Deck A woudl record the mixed audio from the audio input and the audio from the other deck. And Then I would take that new recrding and put it in Deck B, and record another layer on a new tape in Deck A, and on and on. It wasn;t very sophisticated and the quality of the recordings would get more and more degrated with each recording, but it's what got me started thinking about layering sound and music.

The Alesis MMT-8. That really brought me into the world of sequencing and using MIDI to write music. At the time I also bought a Roland XP-10. I made lots of music with these machines. Now long after I saved money and bought a sampler. The Roland SP-808.

Around this time I composed my own soundtrack to Disney's Alice in Wonderland. the old cartoon version.

The Longer Story

High-school Joel makes music in his parent's basement.