Music
I create electronic music under the name Dei Sub - which is derived from Princeton's motto, but does not carry any specific meaning from it. In other words, don't try to figure out the music by translating the Latin. When I say "electronic music" I mean pretty much anything that would be classifed as techno, tech house, drum n' bass, dark trance, ambient, experimental, etc. I do NOT like most trance (which sounds like trash) nor most mainstream dance music, which is typically just pop songs over club beats. I'm not into soulful vocals, in fact I once told someone that I thought vocals in music were vulgar (in the intellectual sense, not like rap lyrics). In fairness, a lot of people would probably say my stuff sounds like trash too; that's just the way it goes.
You can find my official discography, naturally enough, on this Discogs page. Here's my most recent album, Fourth Dimension, on Spotify. There is also a Dei Sub Facebook page, and at one point I was maintaining a separate site for it here.
I'm less influenced by specific artists (with a few exceptions like Joey Beltram, Speedy J, and DJ Cam) and more by specific tracks that have captured my attention over the years: Jamie Myerson Heartsong, Norma G Son of Norma, Age of Love, Shogun Nautilus and Latin Nights, Swing Time Dee Your Wildest Dreams, Nepa Allstar The Way, etc. Also influential are some of the really good DJ mixes I've come across, like James Lavelle's Tribal Gathering and Cream Live, some of John Digweed's best work, Sasha Global Underground Ibiza, and many others. I appreciate hard dissonant techno, but I also love evolving complex chords you can listen to for hours. I also appreciate a great many classical composers, among them Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Mahler, Saint-Seans, Prokofiev, Stravinsky... you get the idea. To me music is about the product you hear and not about seeing the performance, although a virtuoso can be impressive to behold. As far as I'm concerned, parties should always have DJs and never live bands, and it better be a good DJ. I've been to a few rock concerts in my life, and just don't really get it: the crowd experience, ear-blistering volumes, etc. Anyway...
Music and I have a relationship that goes back to when I was a young child picking out tunes on an upright piano, followed by ten years of formal classical piano lessons culminating in a solo performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in my final recital before heading off to college. I'll be honest, I hated practicing, and would have been much better if I had practiced as much as I was supposed to - but that kind of perfecting repetition was and is not for me.
My love of electronic music began quite innocently with the addition of a Sound Blaster Pro to my college computer during my freshman year. That sound card had a MIDI interface and an internal synthesizer, and I discovered that it could be used to create music and not just play it (you know, the product vs. performance thing). I got into trackers and at about the same time found techno, after years of listening to mostly classical music with a tiny smattering of more mainstream stuff like Led Zeppelin and U2. The energy of the driving beats combined with the layering of harmonic sounds and dissonant noise was irresistable. Next came a controller keyboard in the form of an E-mu Proteus MPS+ Orchestral, and by the time I graduated college I had another keyboard (a Korg DW-8000), a better computer with two better synthesizer sound cards (a Gravis Ultrasound and Sound Blaster AWE32), Boss BX-16 mixer, and dreams of getting a lot more gear and spending all of my free time making music (which I did for a few years). Incidentally, the Proteus, focused on ROM sample playback, was one of the worst possible choices for creating electronic music - it didn't even have a filter module, although I spent countless hours faking it with layered harmonics and oscillator envelopes.
By the late 90's I had another vintage keyboard (a Roland Juno 106), racks full of outboard gear like synths, samplers and effects modules, a real mixer, and a few records out on vinyl with a small Baltimore-based label called Defective Records, run by the guys in the band Glitch. In 2001 I found a newly released piece of software called Propellerheads Reason, a "virtual studio" on the computer. After a very brief interlude of using both Reason and my outboard gear, I made the jump - and transitioned to using only Reason to produce music.
Fast forward 20 years, and Reason is now up to version 11 - better and more robust than ever - and it is still my tool of choice for making music. I have way more Rack Extensions than I should and like to do the entirety of the production work inside Reason, from sound design, composing, and arrangement through to mixing and mastering. My attention to music has waxed and waned over the years, reaching a low point when I was getting promoted to Chief Technology Officer and married all within a short span of time in the mid 2000s, but it usually comes back strong.
Other than Reason itself and a mighty powerful computer to run it, my studio gear is pretty minimal:- Denon AVR-3801 surround receiver, formerly what drove my home stereo system, equipped with high-quality speaker and headphone amplifiers and a very good DAC to process the optical digital feed from my computer. Since I do all virtual synths and hardly any audio recording, the motherboard onboard sound chip and ASIO4ALL are perfectly adequate.
- Proteus MPS+ Orchestral controller keyboard, still my first keyboard from the early 90's. It does the job and I have gotten used to its very light touch. Aside from problems with a couple keys that I fixed myself, it's been rock-solid in operation. I still have the DW-8000 and Juno-106 in the basement, doing nothing (probably deteriorating, but perhaps also appreciating). Side rant: controller keyboards generally suck. I have a USB Edirol in the basement that I tried using but didn't like, and also wound up returning one of the supposedly "high end" M-Audio Axiom Pro keyboards because of the shitty, spongy key feel. A really quality synth-action controller keyboard is surprisingly hard to find, should mine give up the ghost; everybody seems to want knobs and sliders and buttons, to hell with a quality keybed. Also, if I need a real piano feel, I have a high-end Yamaha Clavinova CLP-990, with real hammers, in the next room over that far surpasses most weighted-action controllers. That's where I play my Debussy and Rachmaninoff.
- KRK 7000B studio monitors, which I also bought back in the mid 90's. They sound incredible and have pretty decent bass down to around 40 Hz. At one point we were having some replacement windows done at our house, and the lead installer was also in a band. He was only familiar with the "new" KRK, which has moved down market, and questioned how I could mix properly on "those K-Roks," not realizing that they were actually a couple of the best speakers KRK ever made, from back when the company was run by its founder.
- Sennheiser HD650 headphones, which I picked up specifically to master my Third Planet album. They are excellent, but in hindsight I probably should have gotten the HD600's, which have less bass emphasis and therefore are probably less fatiguing during long mixing sessions. They're over-ear headphones and so very comfortable for extended periods.
- Grado Labs SR200 headphones were my previous main headphones, an odd choice - a gift from my parents years ago. They have excellent detail, but are rather bright with a very weak bass. I still use them as one of my many reference checks for mixes, although I hate on-ear headphones and they hurt like hell after a while.
- AKG K240 Monitor (600 ohm) headphones are another of my reference checks, not as good as the Sennheisers but pretty flat with good detail. I got them many years ago, not realizing how good they were for the purpose. Comfort wise they sit between the other two models.