Keith Hillebrandt: Father of the Drone | ||
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 Audio Initiation After finishing school, Hillebrandt figured that if he was going to hold down a job, then he might as well hold down a job that was related to the process of making music. He first got a job working for a tape recorder manufacturer, then moved over to work for a company called Audio Images that represented WaveFrame — a competitor to the Synclavier and Fairlight systems. “WaveFrame put out an amazing machine for its time. It was a $120,000 computer with a built-in digital mixer with digital EQ you could automate, and a 32MB, 16-bit sampler in it,” he explains. “There was a sequencer that was built into the machine — a program called Texture that was written by Roger Powell. “That was the first time that I’d heard such a tight-feeling sequencer, because everything was internal and it wasn’t going out to MIDI,” says Hillebrandt. “And it wasn’t until recently that I’ve been able to get that feel again out of a sequencer. Finally, with all the soft synths that are out, you can again cut out the delays of interfaces and cables and things like that.” “You’d come up with sounds, and they would always want something even stranger,” says Hillebrandt. “This kept pushing me.” On to StudioVision
While he was working at Opcode, the company OSC spawned the original front-end for Pro Tools — ProDeck — and put out a sound library. “When I heard the first ‘Poke In The Ear’ CD, I was blown away, so I got in contact with them. I then made a bunch of sounds for them that eventually got onto the second and third ‘Poke In The Ear’ CDs,” explains Hillebrandt. “It was a great experience because nothing was too strange for the guys at OSC. Diffusion Of Useful Noise But right when the library was scheduled to come out, Macromedia bought OSC. “That was the end of the OSC sound library world. So, there were about eight or nine months where Ron MacLeod, who had headed up OSC, wasn’t sure what was going to happen with my sound library,” he says. Next page: Maker of Useful Noise |  |
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