Welcome to the Machine — Intro

How technology became part of the way I make, record and perform music

Ever since I was a kid, I have been obsessed with gadgets and technology. My dad was an engineer and I was surrounded by electronics from a very early age. I was also obsessed with music from an early age, again thanks to my dad, so I suppose it was inevitable that those two worlds would collide when I later grew into both a musician and an engineer myself.

This series documents bits of that journey and how, over the years, technology has become intertwined with the music my friends and I make.

Along the way, I’ll write about the things I have learned, the mistakes I have made, the problems I have encountered and the bits of music technology that continue to interest me.

Some of it will be about guitar effects, some of it about recording, some of it about live performance and some of it about the slightly hidden machinery that sits behind the songs. Not because the machinery is the point, but because it has become part of how the music is made, shaped and expressed.

As is the nature of this site at large, there’s no set agenda for this series.

I hope you enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoy writing about it 🙂

In this series

Part I: Building the Invisible Bandmate
How our backing track system evolved from simple drum playback into an integral part of the live show.

Part II: Hearing the Visible Bandmates
How we stopped leaving our stage sound to chance and built a more predictable monitoring system.