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How I Started Producing Electronic Music

by Nick O'Lothian

I tried again and again to form a band in Frostburg, Maryland. At the same time, Breathgiver was finding ways of telling to me over and over again that He intended me to perform alone.

I discovered that I could not draw sizable audiences with merely my singing and acoustic accompaniment. Maybe I could, but I gave up trying.

A Frostburg State University student named Jerry went into a partial trance upon hearing of my difficulties in forming a band, and he said that I should obtain an electronic drum machine. I recognized this as being a message from God.

It was the idea of Dan Merrill for me to purchase a Korg Electribe-M groove box to use as my backup band.

Dan is a fanatic who lives and breathes electronic music. His life's time is devoted to that medium, both listening, cooperating with others, such as myself, and producing his own and other people's electronic music.

I had previously tried to recruit him and his electronic equipment to accompany me on stage, and we rehearsed several times with his groove box and sampler. It went verily well, but nothing came of it, except that he convinced me to purchase my own groove box instead of going onstage with him.

In between times, before I was able to purchase a groove box, another FSU student from Cumberland, Maryland, by the name of Jason Crawford recorded accompaniments for me onto cassette tape, using his Roland electronic keyboard and drum machine.

I gave several free impromptu (unannounced, unpublicized) performances at a local bar, using those backgrounds recorded by Jason Crawford. They were well liked by the few hearers who happened to show up during those performances.

Eventually I saved the money and bought the Electribe. I had spent decades conceiving of arrangements that I would do whenever I would get the means to generate multiple tracks.

Thus I have, waiting to be produced, about 40 albums that will employ the electribe groove box. Dan Merrill offered to capture (into computer) the tunes from the groove box, and to record my singing and guitar playing along with them, and to master them, using his sophisticated equipment.

We started doing this slowly. In the meantime, I made some cassettes of the accompaniments and lent them to people. Those people played the cassettes for their friends, and everybody said they wanted to buy the cd's when they would be available.

So I asked Dan to go ahead and burn one with the only few numbers we had done so far, just to fill that demand as soon as possible, and we could finish the album later.

Meanwhile, I recorded almost all of the instrumentals and song-accompaniments stored in the memory of the groove box, into a second cd,
"WAY OUT THERE"