Background
Workbench music was “officially” started in 1998. My interest in music composition came about a few years earlier.
I went through a couple years of music theory when I was a teenager, but that was it for the formal training. It was kind of fun, but not really useful for the way I wanted to write music.
This whole thing began with soundtracker and noisetracker on the Amiga. That was toward the end of 1995 (I first got my hands on the Amiga in ‘89). Using a Tracker to write music is a tedious process, but with a bit of practice it becomes a very powerful tool. The main advantage is that it’s free and almost self-sufficient, all you need is a bit of patience and a computer. “Equinox” is a good example of my early attempts with Fast Tracker 2 (the best PC-based tracker of the 90’s, in my opinion—but I hated Impulse Tracker, so I’m biased). I was pretty active in online communities back then and joined groups like Level-D and Calodox. I met a lot of interesting people from all parts Europe, it was a lot of fun.
Things changed drastically when I moved to Canada in the Fall of 1998, after the album Satellite. I finished Dream of Silence within a few months, and invested in some new hardware and made the switch to MIDI in the Summer of 2000. MIDI gear sounded great, but with my limited equipment I found it cumbersome and tedious. I moved to the “Reason on a laptop” setup in late 2002 (my first attempt with Reason, metro, is also in the b-sides). Today I use a more cohesive setup, combining software like Reason and hardware synthesizers.
For details on the gear I use, see here.