Josh Bordelon October, 15, 2012

EPD application essay: Why I wish to be a EPD major. I have always been passionate about synthesizers and their contributions to music. For as long as I can remember, recordings that featured synthesized sounds had always been more fascinating and pleasurable for me to listen to. I found myself in love with the records of ELP and Isao Tomita in particular and I think it was probably because I was very involved with classical music since the age of 10 when I really started getting into my piano lessons. I have been designing sounds, recording, and doing amateur production for 5 years. In my freshman year of high school my dad downloaded a program called ZynaddsubFx. It was a freeware soft synth for my computer running Ubuntu. I spent many sleepless nights trying to recreate the synth sounds I loved from all my favorite recordings. I didnt know what I was doing, but I experimented a lot until things sounded close enough. I was pretty obsessed with making cool synth sounds but nobody else I knew cared at all so it remained a solitary activity. Also around that time I started experimenting more with MIDI and controlling multiple patches in Zynaddsubfx with different MIDI keyboards. I performed songs for my school with my dads laptop running Zynaddsubfx and playing along to drum sequences I made in Rosegarden (a freeware DAW for Ubuntu). In the summer before my Junior year of high school I got a black Macbook and Logic Studio 8. The quality of instruments that Logic provided was a huge step up from ZynaddsubFx and Rosegarden and I spent the next two years just experimenting with Logics instruments and creating many different sounds and recordings that I shared with family and friends and internet communities. It wasnt until I started using Plugins like Absynth and Alchemy that I realized how bad my projects actually sounded. I feel there is untapped potential within the world of synthesis and MIDI and that drives me to pursue learning more about it. Especially since there are an infinite number of ways to perform MIDI controlled instruments. It was so inspiring to me when Eigenlabs released the Eigenharp or when I saw Dr. Boulangers Radio Batons for the first time or Misa Digital creating the Kitara or Haken Audio creating the Continuum (I was so excited when I discovered Berklee had one). Just seeing the Eigenharp was inspiration enough for wanting to learn more about creating MIDI instruments. I find it is much easier for me to create something unique and perform songs in a unique way when using MIDI instruments, and to me, unique music is very important and it is always more interesting and pleasurable for me to listen to.

The EPD major is my reason for choosing to attend Berklee because it seems like a good place to learn about sound synthesis and production and when I got to Berklee I discovered that there is even more to the major than that. I think learning about the material I have heard about in EPD would be a lot harder to do on my own so it only makes sense to me that if production and sound design is something I want to learn then a curriculum that teaches it with Teachers that have experience in it would be an ideal environment for me to do so. My most important accomplishment to me is the music I have created so far in my life. I am obsessed with constantly trying to create music that is unique but also pleasurable for me listen to listen to. To be honest I am bored with a lot of music I listen to nowadays and I crave to hear and experience new and creative ideas. So, frustratingly, I decided a long time ago that the best way I am going to get that is to make it myself. I have gotten less uptight about music over the years, but I am careful not to let it effect my ideas. Still, I think I have learned to become more open to accepting the music I hear. The personal skills and attributes that are important to me are: creativity, willpower, openness, sense of humor, and loveBut I am not going to write about love in my EPD application essay, so I will start with creativity. Creativity is especially important to me because life would be boring without it. The more creative I am, the more fun and interesting my life is. I dont get bored, because I choose not to be. I choose to be creative and find something to do out of the infinite number of possible things that can be done, which is pretty exciting if you think about it. Willpower is very important to me because it allows me accomplish anything I want to. I realized early in my life (I am 20 now so I think my life is still in its early stages but I mean earlier in my life) that it is pretty easy to get things done when I put my mind to it and stick to it (though I have been told I am stubborn because of that). If I want to learn and memorize Beethovens Pathetique sonata in less than 2 weeks then its as good as done if I know I have the time for it. I think the only things that will keep me from accomplishing a goal would be if I died or created a selflimiting belief that tricks me into believing that I am unable. Openness is something that I cherish in anybody. When I notice that I can be open about something I immediately feel reassured that I have nothing to lose, because I really dont and I hope I never do. When I notice openness in others I I feel like it is much easier to connect and share ideas with them, which seems pretty crucial for anybody I am working with or spending a lot of time with. I make an effort to be completely open to anything that doesnt jeopardize my health and well being.

Sense of humor is just a necessity for me. Food, water, air, and laughing. If I make even the slightest effort I can find humor in literally anything. Maybe it ties into being creative but I think its pretty easy to see how funny anything can be if you just think about it for a second. Life is just completely ridiculous and makes so sense at all (You can tell I enjoyed Monty Pythons The Meaning of Life when I watched it). I wish serious luck to the guy who has a hard time laughing when an idea is obviously intended to be humorous. I have seriously considered Hypnotherapy as a profession because hypnosis is a very important part of peoples lives and can be even more powerful when directed to a beneficial source within oneself. I enjoy hypnosis very much but if I were to do it as a Therapist I would need to go to school and get a PH.D in Psychology. For now its a very rewarding hobby and I get what practice I can. Music has a lot to do with hypnosis actually. When I really listen and become aware of all the things in the music and let everything go, letting the music take me wherever, the music is actually taking the role of the hypnotist. I realized that I could achieve the same results in a person really listening to my music as if they were under hypnosis. After I realized that, it made so much sense to me why artists like Boards of Canada have the words they do in their music, but that is just the most obvious example to me. I think naming the genre Trance was a really good idea and I have heard many dance tracks with a narrative voice just like a hypnotist. So I figured, why would I drop music to pursue hypnotherapy, when I can do both by continuing to make music?

Song Examples: YOUnified Recorded this month (October 2012) The entire track was written, performed, recorded and mixed by myself in Logic Studio 8 in one dark and inspired evening in my apartment. I had recorded the piano track the day before and at the time I was thinking it was just going to be a draft recording that I will fish out at a much later date but the next night a lot of ideas came in my head and the song really changed a lot from just piano. I used Absynth and Omnisphere to design some of the synths. The Percussion and vowel drone bass I designed from samples of my voice. Equipment used: Macbook Pro Logic Studio 8 Edirol PCR-300 Rode Nt1a Behringer Truth B2031A Monitor speakers Mbox 2

2 Words Recorded last spring (March 2012) This track was an entry for a rework contest hosted by Ninja Records Emika. The song was produced in collaboration with Travis Yee, who joined EPD this semester. Travis created all the percussion with various samples and plugins in Ableton Live 8. I recorded all the melodic instruments and vocals in Logic Pro 8 and the song was mixed in Ableton Live. Emika didnt end up picking the track for her contest (I dont think it was her style) but I was still satisfied with just having created the song. Equipment used: Macbook pro Logic Studio 8 Ableton Live 8 Edirol PCR-300 Samson CL2 Behringer Truth B2031A Monitor speakers Mbox 2 Line 6 Interface