About…
Me, myself, and nobody else
I was born at the beginning of 1960, in the south-west of England. I was educated at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire.
I served for nine years in the RAF, which was the start of my career in electronics and computers, but I gradually moved over into software development.
As my first career is nearing its end, I am now ramping up a second career as a composer, this time using a software-based studio.
Halo Serene
I compose Electronic/Ambient music that is mainly influenced and inspired by the music of Tangerine Dream, particularly that from the period of their Phaedra album onwards (Rubycon, Stratosfear, etc).
However, I’m not restricted to being influenced only by Tangerine Dream, I enjoy a wide range of other diverse artists/groups, including JMJ, Vangelis, Genesis, Nightwish, Gary Numan - to name but a few.
I’m also influenced by classical composers such as, for example, Bach and Wagner, and many others.
Influences and Inspiration
When I first started in music, I had a hardware studio based around the Atari 1040STE running C-Lab (Emagic) Notator. Sadly, I ended up moving around a lot, so in the end it all had to go. However, I do still have all the MIDI files, so who knows, some of those may get reused in future projects.
I now use the Presonus Studio One DAW (v6.6.2) running on Windows 10 as my composition tool.
I have a fairly extensive collection of software synthesisers, mostly good emulations of classic analogue synthesisers from the 70s and 80s (Moogs, Oberheims, Prophets, etc), the instruments that Tangerine Dream used, as well as ‘go-to’ synths such as Diva and Serum. There’s even a really good emulation of the Mellotron.
The hardware that I use includes Presonus ATOM and Faderport V2 controllers, and the Native Instruments Maschine 3 controller.