I'm an ambient electronic kind of nerd.

Aturax is a computer musician who despises writing about himself in the third person. I was brought up in North Wales, not a particularly exciting place in terms of music scene but close enough to Liverpool should I have wanted to go there.

I started composing music at 13, I got my first DAW (House Ejay) if you can call it that, and just started combining loops for a year or two. Later I remember getting Ejay Music Director Pro and being blown away when I opened up what seemed to be a very basic EQ unit - "wow" I though, "now I can actually change the way these loops sound!"

I think my first real taste of what using a proper DAW was like would have been when I got a copy of Propellerhead Reason 2.5 from... I can't remember. Again, I was amazed by another simple feature - the ability to program notes and design sounds to be triggered by those notes. This was huge! Until very soon after when I realised that it was actually quite fucking difficult to get a good sound, but I stuck at it. I remember getting really excited when I'd made something new that was marginally better than my usual crap, only to listen to it again the next day and realise that actually it wasn't all that different.

I must have been about 16 when I got Reason 2.5, then version 4 came out a couple of years later and again I got blown away by the new features it included. Then I hear about the best DAW on Windows, this thing called Cubase. Which sucked. I hated it, Reason had such a nice user interface, it all made so much sense, you could track the signal path and route things any way you wanted - ok, not quite. But still. Cubase has got to be the most un-inspiring thing I've ever seen come through a computer monitor. By this time I was still making house music, influenced from my humble beginnings using Ejay.

Things didn't really take off until I got to uni, and by that I only mean I was managing to finish songs and be fairly happy with the way they would turn out. I have never had any financial success with my music, I just make it and enjoy listening to it - if anyone else likes it then I get a big kick out of that. At this point I was making Drum & Bass, its all I was really listening to for the best part of two years, followed by the rise of Dubstep and then Brostep. My attempts at making music within these genres seemed ok at the time, but now I can acknowledge they were also total crap.

So in the past year and a half, since a couple of things in my personal life changed, I have been drawn more towards ambient electronic music. Designing intricate bass lines with shed loads of automation just wasn't happening. I guess my biggest influences in the past year would have to be artists like Burial, Bop, a lot of stuff released on the Med School label and Netsky. These guys have some awesome music and if I could make a track just half as good as they can then I'd be happy with that. I think my biggest downfall is when it comes to mastering, that whole concept is still a mine field to me. I guess its the same as everything else though, keep practicing and hope you don't suck at it for too long.

Anyway, could blab on for ages. Hope you enjoy my music and if you do maybe look me up on facebook... cheers!

Setup:
Macbook
Logic 8
Reason 4
Roland Gaia SH-01
NI Massive 1.3
M-Audio Fast Track Ultra
AT2020 Condenser Mic
SM57 Dynamic Mic
H4n Recorder