Transcription: 0357 - Drew Schlesinger

Released: June 6, 2021



Darwin: Okay, today I get a chance to talk to somebody that came out of nowhere for me. I was sitting back one afternoon, paging through Facebook, and all of a sudden I saw some entries about some of my favorite synths and a person talking about doing some development on sound design. And as time went by, it was more and more of my favorite synths. It was like watching a parade of all my favorites, and this person was involved in working with both the companies and with the individual machines over an incredible period of time. Now, anyone who listens to this podcast knows I kind of love talking to people who got a chance to surf through all of the changes that happened in synthesis from the eighties through the 2000's and beyond. If there's anybody that answers that call it's today's guest, his name is Drew Schlesinger and I am just going to jump into it and say hi, so Hey Drew, how you doing?

I want to thank you for taking this chat. I will tell you, man, I was blown away when you started like listing the different things that you had worked on. It literally was like watching a parade of my favorites walk past on the Facebook screen.

Drew: That's great. It's interesting, the whole history of how it started and the number of projects and products that I got to work on. I finally put a list together and started looking at it and I was like, "Wow, that's a lot of stuff!"

Darwin: So, for people who aren't aware, why don't you give us a quick tour of what that body of work is.

Drew: A quick tour... Okay, so it really started in 86, starting with the Casio CZ-1, a CZ 101 actually. Did some cartridges, did some sound patches, sold them at Manny's. And then Casio asked me to a show at a NAMM show in the summer, I guess it was '87 or '88. And from there I just started attending NAMM shows and eventually got to meet the people who were responsible for sounds and sound design for products across pretty much any manufacturer that was doing either affects devices or synthesizers. And I just kept knocking on their doors and saying, "Hey, this is what I do." And I started getting a resume and one thing led to another and it was pretty much all the manufacturers, Roland, Korg, Ensoniq, Kurzweil, Yamaha. It's just hard to remember, Kawai, Technics and then effects - Eventide, Lexicon, Sony, Yamaha, and just one thing led to another. I started getting some very good response and it was really just promoting myself and trying to get involved and build trust with these companies. And they would tell me about things that were upcoming - and Emu was another big one. So between '86 and 2000, that was how I was making my living, doing sound design.

Darwin: Yeah, it's really remarkable because there is sort of like this whole end of the music business that kind of doesn't exist anymore. You talk about like selling cartridges for the CZ-101 and I remember, that was my interaction with Manny's was buying carts for the Casio or buying ESQ-1 carts and stuff like that. They were one of the stores that actually was pretty big into supporting sound designers. I remember them them particularly having interactions - I think they actually spun that off into like a side business or something.

Drew: There was a guy at Manny's, who was the main keyboard guy, his name was Rick Stevenson, who recently passed away, who really ran a very tight ship there, but he really knew what was going on. And he was very supportive of sound designers. And I think it really started with the DX-7, it really changed everything when there were carts and you could store something, right? There was a hardware medium. Originally, I started on paper. I started selling Manny's patches on paper, and then the Easy-CZ cartridges came out, which allowed 64 sounds and Manny's picked them up. And then I went to the public library in New York city and went through all of the major city yellow pages, looking for music stores, got the names, called them up. And say, "I've got this cartridges for Casio CZ. And I think if you're selling them, they sell well selling them at Manny's." And eventually I had this mail order business where I was sending out COD packages around the country at UPS, going there with a satchel at late at night.

Darwin: That's wild. Now, one of the things that really blew me away was not only the number of things that you had done, but the extent to which you were responsible for some really iconic sounds over the years. Very seldom do we think of specific sounds and say, first of all, that completely defines piece of gear. But secondly, I learned the person who did it and the one that blew me away was when you mentioned that you were working with Eventide and came up with the Blackhole algorithm, which I swear they could repackage the s\Space reverb. They could just basically call it the Blackhole. They could package anything with no knobs or anything. I would be the happiest user they would find. It's where that thing sits all the time. And so I was really blown away to be able to say, "Oh wow, this is a person that was involved in the creation of that song!"

Drew: There's really two, and both were for Eventide. That one, and previously to that on the H3000 was Crystal Echos, which turned into what we now know as "shimmer". That was the first commercial version of that. I think Brian Eno had done something with an AMX unit on his recordings prior to that, but there wasn't really a product available. But Blackhole came about when they were developing the DSP4000 and they had an amazing team building that Ken Bogdanowicz, who went on to found Sound Toys. And Dave Derr who built the Distressor (Empirical Labs). So they had an incredible team and they had this really convoluted computer program called a SIG editor. They still have it and it's graphical now, but at the time it was how you built algorithms. I learned the SIG editor and realized that I was actually doing computer programming. And Blackhole was an algorithm. I did it like 3:00 AM one night, and it was just taking a number of diffusers and setting them up in a certain configuration. So Blackhole is actually an algorithm built from the modules that they had internally in the SIG editor. And it just sort of took on a life of its own. I would say that that's probably the most well-known patch that I've done ever for any device.

Darwin: Yeah. Well it's just so iconic and it's amazing to be able to talk to someone about the development of that. We're going to talk more about some of these things. So I have a ton of questions, but before we do those, one of the things that I like doing in my podcast is talking to people about their background, how they grew up and entered the industry. But also my podcast talks to people that have both an art and a technology side to their lives. And, man, really sound design is probably the epitome of combining the two, because what you're doing is you're taking the technology and finding a way to make it musical, to make it artful in a way that other artists are going to be able to build on top of. And so I find sound design to be a particularly interesting area. I'm curious, what is your background, both your musical and your technological background that kind of put you in a good position to take this on as your work.

Drew: It really started in '75. I was going to school at Ithica college. That was right when synthesizers were really just starting. Moog was starting to come out a little bit. You know, you had the Arp 2600 and the Arp Odyssey. My first synthesizer was shown by a guy named Don Crocker of who knew Moog. He showed the Micro Moog in a class that I was taking and I was like, I'm going to get one of those. I went home for Christmas and I said to my parents, "I want to buy a synthesizer, That's what I want. It's not that expensive." It wasn't cheap. And that was my freshman year of college. So I got that. I had played organ but I never took any really serious music lessons, so I'm pretty much a self-taught musician starting on the organ.

Drew: I had a Gibson organ, like the one that the Ray Manzarek used in Doors, the 101 and over the next couple of years, I started buying gear, but probably the most seminal and important thing that I did was in the summer of '76. I went to the Boston school of electronic music for a summer session there that was led by Jim Michmerhuizen wrote the Arp 2600 manual. They had an apartment, a large apartment in Boston. And I spent a summer there and really learned synthesis. I mean the basics of analog synthesis from really some of the smartest people at the time, it was really a great place. That's really how I started getting deeply involved in synthesis and then all my free money that I could make and had went towards buying gear. I then bought an Oberheim Xpander module and a little eight step sequencer.

Drew: I had a four track and while I was at college, I built out a pretty decent small recording studio that was electronic music-focused. And that was really how it started. And then from that point, I did the recording with David Torn in 1978, when he bought an Arp Avatar, I said, "Hey, I heard you bought this Avatar. I have this studio. Why don't you bring it over? I'll show you how to use it. We can explore it." And I had been doing some recording. Then we ended up recording something like 20 pieces together, which sat in obscurity for 40 years until last year. So that's how my background started.

Darwin: Got it. Now, sound design work now is a little bit different because it's sort of gotten normalized that artists will make their own sounds. That wasn't really the case. When some of these early machines came out, you talked about particularly the DX-7, there are so many stories about technicians getting a five-year-old DX-7 in for repairs and not a single preset had been changed, the Prophet 5 as well.

So for you as a person who is making sounds, what did you do to sort of like inspire yourself to make things that you thought would be worth sharing? I mean, were you like in a band and you made sounds that worked in your band, did you just love making sounds and hope that other people would like them? Did you get commissions for people? How did you get pulled into sound design and how did you get inspired to make things for other people to use?

Drew: So that's a great question. And it really started with the CZ-101, which I bought and fell in love with. And of course it had the cartridge expandability, and I just started making sounds. My tagline was "the most unique and musically useful sounds for the Casio CZ". So I would listen to all the music that was happening and I would imagine the different types of tones that somebody might want and the Casio, some of the internal sounds were really cheesy. So I was really trying to make a really wide selection of sounds that I could see people using in recording or playing in bands, analog sounds and some digital sounds. I tried to stay away from cheesy sounds. So some really warm sounds. I really try to design sounds that would provide sort of a, if you think about it as an orchestration, I'm going to use these sounds together - that would be sort of complimentary but different. So I kept thinking about how would you have an orchestra? What are the kinds of tonalities you'd have in an orchestra from an electronic music perspective? I tried to make them all playable so that a keyboardist could play with them and hopefully they would resonate and that they were inspirational. They inspire them to make music. So I guess I was good at that because people responded and they really liked them. I got fan mail, which was really funny because I was selling them. I started with a little ad in the back of Electronic Musician and people would order them, I'd sell them COD and I'd ship them out. And I get letters saying, "These are great, when are you going to put out a next one?" And then I ended up making three 64-voice cartridges. And they sold really well. I mean, I really was able to make a good portion of my living selling those cartridges, COD and to stores.

Darwin: And did you just like buy by the memory carts retail, and then mark it up from there? Or did you have any arrangement with Casio themselves?

Drew: It was nothing to do with Casio, except that they were very supportive and I met Jerry Kovarsky and Ed Alstrom from Casio through Manny's, but the carts - I found the manufacturer, I contacted them, I had boxes made, I printed up the inserts. So it was really run out of my apartment on the upper West side of New York. I was buying the pieces, putting them together, programming each one by hand with a little portable Commodore 64 and a Passport Midi interface, one of the first ones. And I forget which editor software and I'd flip a switch, load a bank, flip a switch, load a bank. So it was pretty tedious. So what I started selling a lot of them, I was still a one man band. It was a lot of work, but it was very satisfying.

Darwin: Sure, I'll bet. Now, one of the interesting things is it was kind of the advent of digital synth systems that kind of opened a door for doing your kind of work too, because prior to that, there were presets and like you said, you could sell and get some information out to people with patch sheets, but it was really those cartridges. And then later on floppy disks that were embedded in the machines that were really the transport mechanism that let you have kind of a robust business, right?

Drew: Yes, it was actually the ability to have a transportable mechanism to deliver the sounds, plug the sounds in. Floppy disks obviously were great, but most of what I did was on the cartridges. Then I did some RAM cards for the Kawai K1 and at that point, pretty much all the synthesizers started to have that capability - to plug in some sort of media, whether it was a cart or a RAM card and load additional sounds. And if you think about it, I mean the Prophet 5 and the Oberheim 4-voice, well, the Prophet 5 had a cassette interface, which was notoriously finicky. It was rough, and not something you could do easily, which is probably why most of the units came back with the factory sounds. So yes, you're absolutely right. Once there was a medium to deliver the sounds that really opened the door. And there were a number of companies, there was a company called Valhalla, Fat Man Music, Sound Source Unlimited out in LA, which had Manny Fernandez who had done a lot of Yamaha work. So it was really the start of third party sound.

Darwin: Yeah. And I remember actually for the ESQ-1, I remember getting Sound Crystals and stuff like that. There was a wide range of companies and you would get Keyboard Magazine and fully half the ads were sound companies. It was a real boom of a business. It's something else. Now my question for you is: you kind of worked from that into actually working with the manufacturers themselves. So with Roland Synths and some of these others, you actually were involved in making the presets that shipped with the machine.

Drew: Yes. And that was the big transition. And actually once I started doing that, I stopped selling my own sounds. So I had put up the Casio carts, I put the Kawai K1 carts out, and then I wrote a book called "The Insider's Guide to the Casio CZ Synthesizer" for Alfred publishing. And between doing that and having my name on the book and going to the NAM shows the first job was really for the Korg M3R 'ethnic' card. I had met Jack Hotop - Korg were out on Long Island. I was living in New Jersey, so they were local. I went there, I met them. There's a guy named Kim Holland who was the head of marketing, I think at the time. And Jack was the main sound guy, and it's still one of the best sound designers there are on the planet.

And he said, well, let's give this guy a shot. And I worked on that. I did some sounds for that card and established a relationship with Korg. And then as I said, I started going to the NAMM shows and saying, "This is what I've done. Send me a unit. Let me show you a couple of patches." And I really kind of established the baseline for how I would work. I would say, I'm going to charge you for X dollars for each patch, whether you choose to use it or not, that way the manufacturer could choose how much of their budget they wanted to give to me. And it is the same for every manufacturer. So I had a set price on a per patch basis. And I said, just let me know how many you want. And usually it was somewhere between 25, 50 or 100, and that kept it even across the manufacturers. Wasn't always so great for me, cause it was hard. The harder the machine to program, the longer it took to make the sounds. But it was a good business model. It was even, and everybody felt that they were getting a fair shake. I wasn't giving anyone a better deal than another.

Darwin: So if we look at like some of the Emu machines, some of the Roland machines, some of the Korg machines, you work on machines that were what we now call ROMplers. They had a bunch of samples in ROM and then programming is sort of like take advantage of those samples. Were you ever involved in choosing or creating the samples that were used or did you generally get the machine after that was already locked and loaded?

Drew: I actually decided not to get involved in sampling, which is interesting - to this day, I've really never been much involved on the sampling side. There were people that were doing it were doing it better than I thought I could, I didn't have really access to a lot of the source material. So I would generally get the units once the ROM was burned. And again my approach, which was, I was sort of a certain flavor that they would hire expressive unique sounds. I wasn't the guy that they came to when they wanted a realistic violin or the best piano.

Drew: I was not that guy. I was the guy that when they wanted something that was going to be different, unique, expressive, and those were the emotive sounds that even if they were comping keyboard kind of sounds, but not using the raw sample on its own, really doing a lot of manipulation to create something different from the source sound. Even if it was a violin, I would change the attack and make it a drone with multiple layers interweaving. So those were the kinds of sounds that I was known for. And that was sort of my moniker after awhile. That's what I got known for.

Darwin: What systems did you work on for Emu? Because they had a real wide spread of stuff. Were you involved in any of the Proteus systems?

Drew: No, I actually gotten involved in right after the Proteus. Morpheus was the first module that they came out with when they started making all those rackmount modules and the Morpheus had a RAM card slot.

Darwin: Oh. So that would be like the time of like the Mo-Phat and Planet-whatever.

Drew: Those all came. It was the Morpheus first, then the UltraProteus, both of which had the Z-plane filters and these incredible function generators, which were straight out of the Buchla school of function generating devices that conditional jump points and all sorts of things, really complex. And the Z-plane filters really allowed you to take the ROM and really manipulate it. They were great. And then they went on to the Orbit, the Mo-Phat, the Classic Keys, the Vintage Keys, Carnival. They came out with a ton of ROM based modules, all similar.

Darwin: Well, it's interesting though. Cause you talk about working on the Morpheus. I knew a number of people that became obsessed with that system and particularly because of the Z-plane filter and those crazy envelopes. But a lot of times it was sort of like what now I think of as doing with Max patches where people will make a thing where it lights up and then it just goes off and does a thing for a long period of time. You could make those kinds of patches with that period's Emu system. How were you able to reign that in and make a musical useful sound out of something that - I would think it would be too tempting just to go off in left field. And next thing you know, you made a bunch of demo sounds, but not really anything that a player could use.

Drew: And that was a constraint you had to consciously say, is this sound something that can be used within a musical context? And I always again thought from an orchestration standpoint, just general musical orchestration, how might somebody use the sound? Which didn't mean that I wouldn't create things that were strange, but again from a marketing standpoint, they were looking for sounds that somebody was going to say, "Oh, I could see how I'm going to use that." So it was striking a balance between something that was interesting, unique, but musically useful so that you could hear a tonality. Generally I wouldn't go into non-tonal sounds that went on forever. So you had to limit your choices. Now on the side while I'm home doing it for myself, whole different story, then I'm trying to make it sound as way out as I possibly could.

I was trying to make it sound like a Buchla 200, but for the work that I did, it was like, okay, I'm doing a job. I was hired to do a job. And I was aware that they're interested in selling units when somebody scrolled that dial, they wanted to be able to hit a note, play a sound, hit a note, play a sound and get some idea of what's being provided there for them, that's going to give them something different and new. And the Morpheus was great at that. As well as the Ultra Proteus, they put the Z-plane filters even to this day, there's still two iconic devices that are still, probably not that well known in general. To synthesists, yes. To the average person, not so much.

Darwin: So of all of the different devices you got to work with. Let's talk about the synthesizer side first: on all the different, synths that you got to work with, what was your favorite and what was the most difficult to achieve good results on?

Drew: Hmm. I would say it's really hard to pick a favorite, but two in particular stand out for a number of reasons, which are the Korg Prophecy and Korg Z1. For a number of reasons, the physical modeling approach that they had done really provided for incredible expressiveness and really different sounds. They were doing analog, they were doing mallet sounds, they were doing blown pipe sounds. You could try to make a trumpet sound that would actually break as you pitched up, the way a trumpet will crackle if you don't play well. I got to go to Japan with Korg to do final voicing. So those two hold a special place for me, they were brilliant machines. And I got in really early before there was even a prototype, it was on a computer prototype.

Darwin: I was gonna actually ask you that because the one thing I remember about both those devices is that their controller systems were actually pretty unique. Like the Prophecy had that like weird roller log with a touch surface and stuff like that. And it seemed to me like a lot of the voices really were almost finely tuned to work with the kind of manipulation you could get out of that.

Drew: Absolutely. Actually that was part and parcel of what made those instruments unique, not only the synthesis methods, but the controls that they provided at the time, which were pretty forward thinking - the log was a pretty funny one because we had all the names for it on a whiteboard at Korg and they couldn't read them. Some of the names shall not be mentioned. They're not politically correct. We had a whole lot of fun with those, but between the two wheels, the log, the ribbon controller embedded in the log, after touch, velocity, it was a ton of work to really make a sound because to a certain degree, you almost had to employ those various devices. Cause you didn't want it to sound like an organ. The idea with that instrument was to try to make it expressive and alive. Cause it wasn't a ROM, right?

Drew: It's really synthesis from the ground up with lots of ability to manipulate all aspects of the sound, even the analog stuff. So they were very forward-looking in terms of their control mechanisms and what they allow you to do. And we were really supposed to look to utilize those and leverage those controls to really make expressive sounds. You asked, what was the hardest one? I'm thinking back, that's funny - maybe the first Alesis Quadrasynth and the only reason I say that it was a very powerful synth, but it had a one pole filter. It was a 6 dB cutoff, no resonance. So you really had to do things with envelope shaping and various other techniques to make it sound different. It would sound great for acoustic sounds, but to get the kind of sounds that I'm used to doing there wasn't a lot, from a filtering perspective to manipulate the sound. It was straight sounds, so you really had to layer things and crossfade and velocity fade, very powerful chip that they had created at the time. A great sounding synth, but I would say that was a challenging, device to work on and get different unique sounds.

Darwin: Sure. Now the other thing is, and I know this from my work in the music industry too, you never know ahead of time what's going to be a hit and what's going to be a stinker. Sometimes you can get a sense of it when you're playing with it. But a lot of times you don't know until the market decides. I imagine that you worked on a lot of synths or effects devices that just ended up not going anywhere or maybe just not getting their place in history that maybe they deserved. What are some of those that you can think of?

Drew: Actually, the ones that I think are most overlooked and underrated and not well known from a effects device was Sony. They came out with four devices. I don't remember what year it was, but there was a reverb, a delay, a modulation, and a filter. And they were single rackspace devices, beautifully designed, incredibly powerful, sounded awesome. But Sony's marketing was not sexy. Sony had a very sort of staid approach to their marketing. And I don't think that those devices ever really took off the way they should have because they were great. There's an old story, which I mentioned in one of my Facebook posts that apparently Lou Reed... somebody dragged a EMT played up to his studio and he had the Sony R7. And he said, "No, I like what's in the Sony box better", which I'm sure was not music to the guy who played. So those are probably the hidden gems.

Darwin: I've, I've heard stories particularly about that R7 and there's some chip in that, and it fails and people who are adherants to that thing, you know, just search them out wherever they can find them because they are so beloved by some people.

Drew: Well, it was a stereo reverb and actually they created the first stereo reverb. I think it was the 201, the R-201 or something like that, which Ibanez had actually packaged. And that's probably around '86, '87. And that was the first true stereo algorithmic reverb. So Sony had actually been doing it for quite a while. And I have heard subsequent that some of the chips inside had issues over time. Now we're talking things that were from 1990s, early nineties, so, 30 years ago. And now as I'm starting to post some of these things on Facebook, I'm seeing that some of these devices had things that failed, but at the time the failure rates were very low. They worked, batteries would go bad.

Darwin: When you're working in this stuff, whoever thinks about what how it's going to work 30 years from now either.

Drew: Who even thought 30 years ahead, we were thinking what's coming out next NAMM show. What's going to be in the summer NAMM. And of course at that point there's no internet, you go to the NAMM show and that's where you find out what's new. And that then Keyboard Magazine, Electronic Musician, those were probably the two main vehicles for getting the word out on new products. A lot of people trying to get space in the magazines for reviews, et cetera. So those are probably the unsung devices I'm trying to think of from the synth world. Actually the one from the synth world that probably is also similar is the Technics WSA-1.

Darwin: I was going to specifically ask about that. I knew that you had worked on that. And I actually had a friend who was a big fan of that synth, but he was like the only person I ever knew who ever even had one,

Drew: I think Technics suffered from Technics-itis. They nobody thought sbout techniques synthesizers. But they really hit it out of the park in a lot of ways. I mean it was similar in to the core devices, three wheels, huge display, an orbit controller, which was like a ball, physical modeled filters, lots of voices. That was also a difficult one to work with because you were, you were taking static rom sounds and you were creating the animation through the physical model to filters, had some great effects. And when I posted it, I was surprised that people were like, yeah, I have one of those. I love it. That's the one that I'm trying to find. It was totally unique and it was a hybrid between a Morpheus and the Korg Prophecy. It sort of fell inbetween cause it was ROM based, but it had physical modeling with lots of control. And I think it was a commercial flop, they didn't sell many and unfortunately they stopped and they never took the next step. That's how large corporations - it's not uncommon.

Darwin: Well they never touched synthesis again ever. So when you, when we started this talk, you talked about kind of doing it from like the late eighties through 2000. Do you still do sound design work?

Drew: Very little. So the true story is in 1998, I joined the corporate world doing web program management in the financial services industry. And how that came about was which I haven't posted yet. I created a product called Ear Saver, which was a downloadable ambient music player. This predates iTunes by a few years, '97 and '98. It used a tracker engine and I made these samples little samples that I would crossfade so that I could play hours worth of ambient music, it was soundscapes. I did that, put that out. It was licensed to Simon and Schuster. They put it in a box, they sold it in CompUSA. And then I had a neighbor next door who was working at Merrill Lynch. He said, I need somebody to do what you just did with that and help me. And over a period of two or three years, I transitioned out of the sound design.

I think the last product that I worked on was the Vsynth for Roland. And I pretty much have been quiet in the background for the last 20 years. I did some work for a few software companies. Sound Toys is Ken Bogdanowicz, who started Sound Toys, was a main engineer at Eventide. So I've done a lot of work with them over the years for all of their plugs and the rack. I did some work with G-Force on a couple of their synths. So I haven't really done much in very long time. I haven't been dormant over the last few years. I started using Live and actually Max For Live and really starting to learn that. So it was hard. It was like cutting the cord and just going from one world to the next, going from the musical industry to the corporate world was really very strange. I called my wife up and said "I've landed on an alien planet, and I don't understand what they're talking about."

Darwin: Well, believe me in the financial world, everybody there said, "Oh my goodness, an alien just walked in the door."

Drew: What predicated that was actually fear. When I saw what was going on with VSTs, when Cubase came out, I started to see a noticeable decrease in the amount of hardware that was being built. And there's an old saying, look afar and see the end from the beginning. And I was like, I think this is going to have a real impact on hardware manufacturing, and it did. I mean, 2003 up until, I don't know, 2010, 2011, things were pretty quiet. I mean, Korg and Roland kept turning out things, but of course in the last few years, things have just exploded. So I figured, I did all this work, nobody knows about it. I felt like I was kind of like the Chuck Yeager of sound design.

Darwin: Yeah, you needed, you needed your own version of The Right Stuff.

Drew: And actually I think about that movie, I think it was Apollo 13. I think it was Sam Shepard who played Chuck Yeager. But, I decided I might as well put this out there. Just if nothing else, just to let people know that I did this work, and see what happens and also to find the other people that I knew had collaborated. I was only one of many people who contributed to these instruments. So through these posts, it really has exposed all these other people who have done work on the same devices from different parts of the world, Germany, Japan, UK. And there's some really some stellar sound designers out there. I was one of many who are really talented and Jack Hotop, Eric Persig (probably the pinnacle), Skippy from Plugin Guru, Jordan Rudess was doing sound design as well. So there was a relatively small cadre of people doing it, but larger than I thought. It's been interesting to see and get noticed or notices back from people saying, "Hey, I did sound so on that too." So it's been fun.

Darwin: Yeah. Well, I want to so much thank you for not only sharing this story, but sharing the story of your work. And you know, again, like every day (on Facebook) it would be like, boom, there's an Ensoniq unit. Boom, there's the JD-990. It was literally such a parade of memories for me and clearly memories for you too. And I want to thank you so much for sharing that.

Drew: It's a pleasure. I really appreciate your reaching out. It's been fun. I've enjoyed talking with you and, still a few more things to come, but I think that the history is now written and we'll see what the next chapter is. Maybe it'll lead to some new work in the future. I kind of hopes so.

Darwin: I hope so too! Well with that. I'm going to let you go. Thank you so much for time.

Drew: Pleasure. Nice speaking with you. Have a great day.

Copyright 2021 by Darwin Grosse. All right reserved.