How I Got into Music

Technically, my first sequencer was Mario Paint.

I grew up playing drums and raiding my dad’s CD collection (Green Day, RHCP, Soundgarden, Dave Matthews), making mixtapes on cassette, recording my friend’s bands, and making beats in FL Studio.

But my love for electronic music?

That started with Guitar Hero. Kinda.

Back in the PlayStation 2 days, gaming magazines included demo discs, and that’s how I discovered Frequency as a teenager — the precursor to Guitar Hero, made by the same team. That game introduced me to early pioneers of electronic music like BT, Paul Oakenfold and Crystal Method.

I was instantly hooked.

This was before electronic music was a thing in the U.S., and iTunes didn’t exist yet. So I’d spend hours downloading rips of BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix sets just to find new music. I was also obsessed with Ninja Tune Records and collected their entire catalogue.

I also played drums & percussion in every concert band/orchestra/jazz combo/drumline, and eventually went to Berklee College of Music on a merit scholarship. I taught production to 50 students during my time there, as a student myself.

As I was graduating, I was hired by a video game studio that was making a more-ambitious Guitar Hero (using a real guitar!), which was a full-circle moment. But as much as I loved it, I knew that if I wanted to write music, I had to be where the action was. So I shipped off to LA.

There I began working with acclaimed film composer Jeff Rona, who later cofounded Wide Blue Sound with me, and the rest is history.

My music’s been shipped by Apple on your iPhone, in blockbuster films like Baywatch, in over 8,500 commercial and TV projects for hundreds of known networks, brands and shows: the Olympics, Game of Thrones, if it’s a popular brand they’ve probably used it, AAA games, trailers, and in stadium speakers between plays. And 500 million plays on streaming services alone.