I'm sure you don't want to know about me, but it's kinda traditional to fill space with such twaddle, so here goes...
By day I'm an IT Director working in the financial markets in London.
I've been designing and managing the design of financial information dissemination systems for um,.. probably 20 years or more. This might mean I know something about them, it might not.
By night, I'm the Saxophone, Taragot, Wind Synth and assorted Woodwind player with the English Ceilidh band Florida and world famous Molly Dancers The Seven Champions, probably the only English dance side to have been the subject of somebody's doctoral thesis (I kid you not).
Florida play English Ceilidh music. Ceilidh's are the non-boring face of English traditional dancing. The bands tend to be more electric, and to play standing up (an important though oft-overlooked point). Florida's raison d'etre (as it were) is that we don't have a percussionist. We think the rhythm provided by the electric guitar / bass combined with the bright contrapuntal melodies of the horn section are quite sufficient. Besides which, drum & bass-led ceilidh bands all sound the same!
I have long been obsessed with the conjunction of computers and music. I did my degree in what was essentially sub-silicon electronics, (sub-atomic physics [er... pure maths? {...sums(!)}]to the rest of you), but ended up designing and building a wind controller for my kit-built monophonic synthesiser as my final year project. Quite unusual for 1981, though it was some years before I realised that there was probably commercial potential in it.
The same goes for some of my early experiments with audio sampling and synthesis in the mid-eighties during those slack times which all electronic engineers experience between projects. I built an 8-Bit 11KHz 4Mb sampler, but discarded it because I couldn't work out how to shift the pitch whilst keeping the note length the same. It turned out that none of the big sampler manufacturers (Akai, Roland etc) could either. Ho hum.
I finally achieved some degree of recognition (if not financial sucess) in the field of sample format conversion. The world abounds with a myriad different proprietary sample file formats, hardly any of which are transportable between diferent sampler and synth platforms. I spent a couple of years reverse-engineering all of the commonly-available sample file formats and writing software programs to convert one to another.
The end result of this was Resample Pro, a bit of a niche product, but one which proved to be invaluable to the sonic architects and designers, the people who design the sounds that the hoi polloi use in their synthesisers, sound cards, and video games.
I've played the flute from age 8 or thereabouts. Having progressed through county youth and university orchestras, I stumbled into traditional music though Irish whistle music whilst hunting for something to play which wasn't either contemporary plink-plink-fizz music or neo-classical hogwash.
For a year or so I thought I was the only person on the planet who played this stuff until I joined east kent-based North-west clog morris side Offcumduns and through them met a number of like-minded musicians and realised I'd just scratched the surface of a rather large iceberg.
In the search for volume I took up first Chaleaumeaux then Saxophones, though the instrument which really captured me was the Taragot. Mine is made by Breton bombarde maker Olivier Glet, and is a completely superb instrument. It's pitched in 'D', and has a good C sharp and C natural, so plays in both D and G. It over-blows an octave (like a sax), and has a range of about 2 octaves, it's open-holed so you can use all your favorite finger ornamentations just like an open-holed flute, and it's bloody loud as anybody who has sat in front of me can testify!!
More recently, I've purchased a VL70-m, Yamaha's physical modelling synth module which, when combined with the yamaha WX-7 wind controller which I've had for some time now, provides me with a fairly serious sonic arsenal. The WX-7 is a complex and unforgiving controller to play, but the results can be very rewarding.
The very latest addition to the sonic arsenal is this rather astonishing straight tenor sax made by the LA Sax company (who are in Chicago for reasons best known to themselves).
Discography