Legal Info

All the music that is downloadable on this page is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

This basically means that you are allowed to download, play and broadcast it aswell as burn it on CDs and give it to everyone interested, as long as you don’t earn any money with it and mention me (preferably by linking to my page). This means that Radiohosts should mention the URL, DJs should put the URL in their playlist and so on. Also you are not allowed to edit my music, so no illegal remixing. If you are interested in doing a remix/mashup etc. just contact me, I am open to these things.
Also note that I am not a member of the GEMA (or any other Performance Rights Organisation), so you do not need (or actually must not) pay royalties to any royalty-collecting Organisation if you play my songs.

Biography

I had no musical education in my early life because as a child I had a malformation in my throat which prohibited me from singing or even speaking loud, so I got an exemption and did not attend music-classes in school.

In 1991 I got a C64 from a friend and discovered the DMC 3.0, at that point I started to learn composing, basically trough trial-and-error aswell as asking friends with experience in musical theory. However, my C64-tracks were really crap because at that time I didn’t have the abilities to compose and arrange. Some of my tracks are in the HVSID-Collection, but I won’t tell you where because it’s simply too embarrassing.

In 1995 I bought a PC and started using Fasttracker. The ability to use samples brought my music to a whole new level. In the past years I learned more about musical theory from books and by practicing, but there are still alot of gaps in my theoretical knowledge of music.

Style and Philosophy

My music is mainly based on four cornerstones : Breakbeat, Samples, Minimal, Energy

Breakbeats

I listened to alot of hiphop and D&B in early years, now jazz and funk, all music that is based on broken rhythm. Even when I try to create a conventional 4/4-track I find myself breaking the rhythm in some way, I just can’t have it straight.

Samples

Although I meanwhile practice composing songs from scratch I usually need a kickstart provided by a sample. This doesn’t mean its a 2bar instrumental-loop (I hate nothing more then the usual “sampled intro+new drumbeat” tracks, actually my samples tend to get smaller), but rather something that has a certain sound, sets a distinctive mood or provides a basic rhythm that I can relate to.
Collecting records is one of my hobbies that I spend most of my avaiable money on, I don’t look for certain records but anything that seems to be “interesting”. For me its a fact that each record has at least 2 seconds worth sampling.

Minimal

I am lacking a huge amount of musical-theory-knowledge, so chord-changes and such don’t come that easily for me. On the other hand I am not too much into notes as such, I am much more interested in rhythm and the way something sounds. So my music is not evolving around chords or a melody but more often around sound and rhythm.

Energy

I try to do music with alot of energy. This has nothing to do with the BPM or effects or the samples, its kind of a force that lies within.

Setup

Software

My main audioprogram is Renoise, a next-generation tracker with VST-Support and very sophisticated audio-engine and usability. Because I started with Fasttracker 2 I am used to the concept of tracking, which is different to the concept of sequencing in a few ways. Apart from a very few minor features that are missing Renoise is quite the perfect program for me and since the developers are working hard on new versions I don’t plan to switch to a sequencer.
Another reason is that my music is entirely based on samples and VST-Instruments and -Effects, I don’t own any hardware-synthesizers or effects which would make it necessary to switch to one of the big sequencers.

Apart from that my harddrive is mostly filled with freeware plugins and software, not because I am a cheap shot but because there are alot freeware plugins around that are based on concepts or produce sounds that are not avaiable in commercial software. And I regularly donate money per paypal to freeware developers.

Hardware

My setup is based on an AMD 3800+ PC running WindowsXP and two 17″-TFT displays.

Especially the two displays are very important. If you plan to spend money on hardware soon I really can recommend getting a second display. Its incredibly convenient to be able to access two programs at the same time without having to use the taskbar, uses include: musicprogram and sampleeditor open at the same time, musicprogram and the GUIs of (several) VST-Effects open at the same time or spanning your program over both screens, for example in cubase/logic you can have the pianoroll on one screen and the mixer/automation/effect-windows etc. on the other.

I use Terratec DMX 6Fire Soundcard which offers exceptional quality for a very low price, it is connected to a normal Kenwood HiFi-Amp. I am used to my Sony MDR-CD-480 headphones, actually I can’t really use speakers to make music, only as reference when a track is finished. I do own some pretty good quadral speakers however.
I use a Radium 49 USB Midi-Keyboard which offers 49 keys, eight faders and eight knobs. Its quite perfect for my needs, although being too big to be easily transportable.
The rest of my setup includes a Numark turntable for sampling, a Gemini PMX-500 DJ-Mixer which I chose because I needed the Punch-In-Buttons and an constantly growing collection of 1600+ records.