About

Welcome

Welcome to my web site! I, Ralph K. aka MetaTron, with a background in classical piano and improvisation, worked as a sound engineer between 1984 and 1995 in a professional recording studio built and equipped by myself and an associate.

From the very beginning

As well as recording for other musicians, I began composing and producing electronic music there in 1985. In the early days, all we had for music production was a Yamha DX7, a Drumtracks drum machine from Sequential Circuits and a Yamaha QX7 2-track sequencer.

The Studio

Over the years, we’ve added, in order, a Roland D-550 rack synthetizer, an Emulator II+ keyboard sampler, a Mac 128K upgraded to Mac+ 1Mb, a Novation Bass Station mini keyboard-synthetizer, 2 Oberheim Matrix-1000 racks and, finally, 2 Akai S1100 rack samplers. At the cutting edge of digital technology right from the start, we connected the Emulator to Digidesign’s Sound Designer II and Turbosynth software on the Mac, to control, produce and edit sound samples. With the rapid democratization of computing, we steadily upgraded our Macs, eventually completing our recording and editing equipment with the Digidesign Session 8 direct-to-disk and Samplecell II sampler computer expansion card. In the mid-1990s, my partner and I realized that technological advances would rapidly democratize audio recording and make the commercial operation of the recording studio uncertain, so we decided to hand it over to one of our external partners.

To the future

For my part, seeing that technology was also going to make music composers obsolete as well, replaced by DJs and loop libraries, I returned to my original instrument, the piano, and specialized in interpreting the repertoire of Chopin, a composer whose musical universe is the same as mine. Nevertheless, I continued with a few bits of electronic music, notably using new approaches to synthesis, such as Metasynth, an application that translates images into sound, and finally, with AI tools that are on the way to making all musicians, electro, jazz, classical, etc., obsolete…