Syntax Error Biog:
I was never really any good at school and dropped out at the age of fifteen before passing my GCSES. I spent a lot of time round an older friend's house smoking weed, listening to music and playing computer games. This was the first time i had really heard any music other than my dads collection of classical music and Spanish guitar records and the early eighties pop music that my older sister used to play.
My older friend was very into the likes of Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream etc as well as old mowtown and dub reggae music. As i carried on hanging around with him on a regular basis i became involved in the petty thefts he committed to fund the purchasing of weed, i became quite an expert on shoplifting etc....
I was now about sixteen years old and had started to sell weed for my friend to be able to make enough money to be able to keep some for myself. This made me come into contact with a lot of people in the pubs around my hometown. I met a person called Jake who was travel originally from Chester. E played bass guitar and was currently living with an old friend not far from me, we formed a band and i brought some equipment and we set it up in his girlfriends garage we had an old organ, bass guitar an mc202 and a Roland 606. This was my first experience of actually trying to make music instead of just noise.
Jake introduced me to a lot of things other than equipment as he was a very heavy drug user. So began a very strange period in my life as i was introduced to hallucinogenics. I became a very heavy user of L.S.D and " magic mushrooms "taking them nearly every other day for two years. By the time i was eighteen i was a total wreck. Seriously psychotic and constantly in trouble with the police for stealing and disowned by my family.
I met someone at this time called Joe Snow. He was a friend of a friend, we became quite close friends and where both very interested in the new acid music coming out of Detroit and decided that we wanted to make music like that. With the equipment i already had and some synths that Joe purchased we stated trying to get gigs and make demo tapes, thinking back we were actually not that bad but because we lived in a small " out in the sticks " town, with a very rock music orientated youth. We were not really taken very seriously. Fed up with signing on the dole and getting generally laughed at for been a pair of geeks. We saw an advertisement in a paper for farm workers in Holland. We decide to go mainly for the dope and the chance of a good laff.
I spent three years on and off working in holland for a wonderfull familey called Cor and Ely Vis, we lived in a caravan in their back garden and became very good friends with them. However things started to go a bit haywire as at the weekends we where travelling to Amsterdam and going out clubbing and taken rather a lot of chemicals. This started to turn into going out during the week as well then most nights and skipping work. We managed to fuck everything up and returned to the UK fully-fledged E and speed heads with an unswerving mission to buy cocaine whenever we possibly could.
Its amazing how easy we slipped back into our old ways, we where dealing drugs and shoplifting and breaking into shops with in about two months of been back, we sold all our equipment to fuel our frenzy and after six months we where total burn outs. I decide to get myself sorted and went to live with my grandmother in a different town and enrolled on an audio engineering course at the local college. Just after i had left Joe snow received compensation from when he was crashed into by a speeding council van, he never told me how much he got but i know it only lasted two months. Dam:(
He now lives in Nottingham and running a recording studio and record label.
Then i fell in love:) it was a friends sister, she is an amazingly strong person and without her i don't think i would have ever moved beyond the level of pond life that i was at that time. She introduced me to a Vegan life style wich i still maintain and really taught me how to be a human being again. It had taken me about for years to recover from the drugs that i had consumed in my youth, for the flash backs the paranoia and the self loathing of what i had done to others to go away. She had always wanted to live in Brighton and had a few friends there, her brother had moved a year earlier and she decided to go. I kind of tagged along for the ride. Unfortunately we are not together know but it was because of her that i finally managed to escape the shit pot of a life i had created for myself.
Since i have lived in Brighton i have started to make music again, i have a reasonably well equipped home studio and i am drug and alcohol free. I work part time for a charity organisation and i am a volunteer for another, IM still single but on the whole IM actually quite happy:)
Kitlist details
Syntax Error Kit List:
Apple mac quadra 610: an ageing 25hz mac running cubase with 32 midi channels.
Amiga 1200: used as a sampler and sound generator, synced via midi to the mac.
Casio fz1: wonderfull old sampler only 2 Megs ram but a great filter and lovely weighted keyboard.
Casio cz1000: underrated keyboard, capable of some very analogue style sounds. Bit of a pain in the ass to program:(
Roland sh101: i used to have 2 202`s and would rather have a 202, but its as near as i can get, as the 202 is just stupidly expensive second hand.
Akai s2000: a recent purchase, and i havnt really gotten my head fully around it yet.
Boss dr660: good all round drum machine with a crisp sound, a little bit naff on the abilty to muck up the sound front.
Cheetah md16: the king of shoddy 80`s beat boxes cryptic as @£$% to program but really capable of some bonkers sounds and beats. If you see on get one:)
Yamaha tq5: cheap fm soundmodule but great at making dx style pads and bass sounds, with inbuilt effects that a really bad but sound really good to me?
Roland d110: i have had this for so long, its sound is a bt week but its good for creating harsh digital noises.
Casio vz8: similar sound architecture to the cz1000 but it never sounds any where near as good:(
Kawai k4r: quite a recent purchase intended to replace the d110, god for drums and analog mimickry.
Kawai rv4: four stereo FX units in one box. Not as versatile as some of the never fx units of a similar style but it was dirt cheap and has better quality reverbs than the other fx units i have.
Yamaha r100: cheap half rack reverb/delay unit. I quite like it as it has a grainy sound and it sounds great when you overload it.
Yamaha emp100: another cheapy half rack but a lot more capable than the r100, it can make some great pitching FX and is good for delays and harsh flanging.
Zoom 1201: cheap multi FX that has some great mangling FX, ring modulator and distortion are my faves.
Jsh analog delay line: just for the classic dub echo fx:)
Dbx 266xl compressor: i used to use this when recording to cd but now i just patch things into it and sample them.
Folio 12/2 and 16/2 mixers: the smaller mixer plugs into the tape returns of the big mixer, its kinda like having an 24 channel mixer but cheaper.
Odd Items and Sundries:
Kareoke machine: this has line inputs you can put your great through and put a really horrible delay on,
sounds can also be distorted and the pitch changed, cheap and nasty.
Korg toneworks pedal: great for roughing things up. nice phasers on it .
Tube distortion pedal: i dont really use this that much know, but it used to be used to totally decimated drum sounds.
Boss flanger pedal: handy to have around to liven things up a bit:)
Drum synth: a guy called Jeff runcorn made this, i got it off him via the net. It basically follows the source sound you put into it and you can twiddle the nobs to create an interesting analog sound1 how easy sis that:)
dod filter pedal: if you have an envelope filter you know the score, if you dont just go and get one okay!
Realistic bass booster: great for cleaning up your bottom end!
And finally my beloved "whisper 2000" super sensitive sound modulator, thats mic to you and me, basically on a quiet night you can hear people shagging 10 miles away:) great for getting embarrassing samples of your flatmates and recording old ladies on the bus without their knowledge etc. I have it hooked up to a little dictaphone and take it everywhere:)
Also about 20 tonnes of bloody cables, thousand of floppy disks, lots of over flowwing ashtrays (rastafari:) and a poor over worked coffee machine:)