Recently I’ve been pondering why I love making music with synthesizers so much. Ever since I was young, I’ve been fascinated by a well executed synth lick or a crazy pulsating arpeggiator. There was something about the visceral powersynths of Van Halen’s “Jump” and Tony Banks sometimes subtle, sometimes brazen work on “Invisible Touch” that led me to traipse down to my local music store to pore over pamphlets from Roland and Yamaha, dreaming of the synth-based studio I hoped to someday own.

In junior high, I managed to convince my dad that my mom needed Roland’s latest (and maybe first) do-everything-but-make-you-coffee workstation synth. It had to be for my mom, because my parents never dropped that kind of dough on my pursuits (probably something to do with “work ethics” and “paying my own way” or some stupid nonsense like that). Once we got it home, I tore it open and read the manual cover to cover, struggling through what seemed to be Roland’s first attempt at translating higly technical Japanese into English. Before long, I knew the system inside and out, and was producing tracks on it that have since, for better or worse, been lost to posterity forever.