Progtronic is:
Rick Richards

Composition & Production Style:
Cinematic, Instrumental, Progressive, Electronic Rock

Instruments:
Computer: Reason: SubTractor, Malström, NN-19, NN-XT, Dr:REX, ReDrum

Musical Influences:
Jeff Beck, Björk, Kate Bush, The Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method, Enigma, Everything but the Girl, Fluke, Front Line Assembly, Peter Gabriel, Iron Maiden, Journey, King Crimson, KMFDM, Led Zeppelin, Massive Attack, Megadeth, Nine Inch Nails, William Orbit, Pantera, Pink Floyd, Rammstein, Rush, Saga, Sneaker Pimps, Soul Coughing, Switchblade Symphony, Steve Vai, Vangelis, Rob Zombie

Other Influences:
Dramatic, Horror and Action films. Twitch/FPS, RPG and Adventure styled video games.

What Does My Music Sound Like?:
Well... that sort of depends on what project of mine you're listening to...

All my styles seem to have a lot of the influences, I mentioned above, sprinkled through them in one way or another. There's also persistent progressive and fusion elements in everything I compose.

SimItar was my first project and is my own unique interpretation of Progressive Rock. Not your traditional Prog Rock sound but more of a refined, modern, exploration. Short instrumental compositions with complex structures, interesting themes and prominent use of electronic instrumentation.

At the time, the bands that influenced me the most were Rush and Saga. I also really liked what bands like Gamma were doing, blending heavy Rock with strong Electronic music elements. So, that was the basic direction I wanted to take with my SimItar project.

After three SimItar albums I wanted to switch gears a bit and try something different.

I started experimenting with Smooth Jazz and my Amaranth project was born. Like the Prog Rock project, I set out to define a unique Smooth Jazz style. Less 'Jazzy', more Electronic and upbeat, with lots of wind styled instrumentation and no guitars.

At that time, a very similar thing, musically, was going on at some local radio stations. I began to tailor the music to fit, to try to break into that market. Unfortunately... the target radio station I had in mind, had since moved on from a local music friendly policy, to a nation wide corporate, syndicated monster. They no longer had any need for local artists.

In a sort of rebellious move... I switched gears, once again, into an almost polar opposite, style wise. My Industrial/Darkwave project, No Dogs Cry and the album Fear of the Dog was launched.

I fashioned a unique Progressive, Electronic, Industrial Rock style. Blending an array of harsh, crunchy, sampled things with heavily progressive, guitar heavy, themes and structures. This project contained some of my most unique and memorable work to date. Bands that influenced me most at that time were Ministry, Front Line Assembly, Mr. Bungle and King Crimson.

Time For A Break:
I took a break from composing for a few years after all that... During this down time I began digging up and compiling full albums worth of my earliest recorded material.

I first began composing and recording back in 1979, in Junior High... so there was a lot of stuff to sort through.

At first I assembled a couple cd's worth of music that had basically been re-recorded pieces I had written in High School. These were decent recordings on a cassette 4-track. I added a few effects, tossed a noise gate onto some of the hissy guitar tracks... and ran them off to DAT tape.

That compilation comprised my Rick Richards - The Early Years, CD's.

Then I began to round up all the work I had been doing over the years writing music for industry video, animation and multimedia. Those became my Rick Richards - The Day Job and SPAMCANNON - Agony, CD's.

I also re mastered my first SimItar album during this time.

Eventually I released all these albums on mp3.com as DAM (DigitalAutomaticMusic) CD's. Considering they were only 128kbps mp3 quality CD's, they sold surprisingly well.

The Next Step:
So... After a few years of doing absolutely nothing musically (in terms of composing...), I decided it was time to jump back into writing music again.

Problem was, I had completely torn down my old midi studio that I had been doing all my composing on and had nothing set up to sequence and record with anymore. Part of the reason I had closed it all down, in the first place, was that I was getting really tired of the daily setup.

Day to day setup results were random at best... After powering everything on to continue on what I had been working on the day before, usually included two to three hours of troubleshooting to get it sounding at least close to what it had sounded like the previous session.

Jiggling cords, tweaking crunchy mixer knobs and sliders, turning on synths and samplers and loading patches...

I wasn't using any computers at this point for my music. It was all hardware (even the sequencer)... old synth and sampler modules, effects racks and boxes, a bunch of keyboards, mixers, lots of audio and midi cables... etc...

Some musicians really love all that hardware and wiring... but it was really slowing me down.

Maintaining a 'modern' sound, with a setup like this, requires a yearly investment in new synths/samples, effects and various hardware. My main mixer was on it's last legs as well... I just couldn't afford the time and money required to keep up.

Then... A friend of mine told me about a new computer program that emulated racks of music equipment... Propellerheads Reason. I had heard of their ReBirth software, and picked up a copy to check it out. It was a small application that emulated a couple classic analog modules (drums and bass/synth, some effects). I messed around with it, and made a few tracks, but found it really limiting... very interesting though.

A few weeks later I came across a Reason demo on one of the disc's that was bundled with one of the Mac magazines I was subscribed to.

I loaded it up and started playing around with it. It was basically emulating almost everything I had been doing with my hardware studio... Just had to use a pull down window to add a new instrument (as many as you want) to the rack. Flip the rack with the [Tab] key and hook up the wiring between instruments however you wanted. Was only limited by the power of my computer.

Instantly hooked... I ordered a copy of Reason a few days later...

Back In Business:
It was sorta slow going at first, but I eventually developed some skills with the new software.

The idea of doing absolutely everything on a computer appealed to me for a variety of reasons... it was a lot more affordable, quicker and easier than hardware.

I set out on my first, official, 100% computer produced album... Progtronic - In The Beginning was the result.

The album was a bit experimental and very electronic. I felt a little limited by the earlier versions of the Reason software, though the basics of what I had used previously in a hardware environment was all there. It proved that I could easily complete entire productions on a single PC.

It was clear, at this point, that there was no way I was ever going back to hardware...

New Reason updates introduced better tools, bringing me even closer to exactly what I was using in my old midi studio. Eventually they added a distortion/amp simulator that mimicked the Tom Scholtz - Rockman X-100 I used to use.

The advanced sampler they eventually added also allowed me to re-create complex guitar patches that contained all the elements I needed to construct more realistic guitar sounds.

Now I needed a new computer to keep up with Reasons advances. I invested in an affordable PC. I could justify this considering the amount of money I was saving not having to buy anymore music hardware. Plus I needed to upgrade for all the other computer things I was now doing with graphics and web site design.

SimItar Mk II:
All the pieces were in place for another Progtronic album. I began composing new songs more in the style of my SimItar project, but a bit toned down and more electronic.

The eventual result was my latest CD, Progtronic - Evolve.

I focused on creating a well rounded album. Slow, medium and fast paced pieces, balanced out with a variety of guitar sounds and styles. Many different kinds of keyboards and synths were used as well. And a variety of acoustic and electronic drum kits, styles and rhythms spread out over the course of the CD.

Took a more cinematic approach and substituted heavy riffing in place of more obvious melodies. Integrating more orchestral flavors into the music. I plan on exploring more orchestral integration in the future.

During the production of Evolve I began receiving emails asking if any of the albums off my back catalog were still available. They had really only been available at mp3.com... but that got me thinking...

This "thinking" of mine ended up making a 'nearly finished' project into a gigantic project that took me nearly 4 years to complete.

I ended up going back through my entire catalog, recovering premasters off of old DAT tapes.

Tracks were digitally transferred from DATs (where previously they had only been spun off through the analog outs) straight to AIFF then converted to WAV's. Everything was much more crispy and clear now which made cleanup and mastering a lot easier.

In the process I recovered even older tracks that had never been released before. These became the Rick Richards - Generations CD's. Stuff that's a bit embarrassing to even release... It illustrated my absolute beginnings musically, using things like cheesie Casio keyboards and toy drum machines.

I didn't have any multi-tracking equipment so I used two cassette decks through a cheap Radio Shack mixer. Playing and recording parts into one deck, re-playing that take through the mixer and playing more parts over that while recording into the second deck... and back and forth till it was completed.

Real old school overdubbing...

The result was usually an amazing mess of swirling hiss... warbly dubs that knocked sections slightly out of tune from the last layer... and muffled instruments that were generally the first to be laid down... usually the drums and bass.

Silly, but sorta cool to see where I started and where I'm at now.

I also recovered more songs that were previously excluded from The Day Job album due to length. Those would now be presented in their entirety.

Found a bunch of extra tunes I had also left out from other projects, for album length reasons... and included them as Bonus Tracks on their original album lineups.

Finally, the re mastering was done!

My original plan was to rip them to the highest quality mp3 possible and burn them all to dvd-rom for inclusion as a bonus disc to my latest release. This would make it easier for people looking for my back catalog. A sorta one stop package for my entire catalog up to that date.

I had heard rumors of mp3 technology having some sort of licensing fee, but had never really thought about it till I started working on the dvd-rom.

Turns out... it does exist: Royalty Rates

No idea how this is enforced... but I really didn't want to find out the hard way...

No wonder Apple uses the AAC format for its iTunes store...

In addition to being a superior, higher quality, compression technology, no licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format.

My choice was obvious...

Ripped everything to AAC at 44.1kHz at three different rates (128, 192 and 320 kbps) then added it to the ever growing folder. Decided to call the dvd 'Retrospect'.

Also thought I should include all the original artwork for each CD at it's highest quality in case someone wanted to burn an audio CD (to listen to in a car or something...) of one of the albums... and print out a nice cover for it.

Threw those in the folder as well... Really, almost done now...

Final step was to create a simple html interface for a dvd browser. I knew I was going to link back to this site for folks who wanted even more info (like this)... so I kept things to a minimum and just featured the art and music with brief descriptions of each project.

After a couple weeks of testing, listening and tweaking it was finally finished!

Album done... dvd-rom done... artwork done... masters shipped off for replication...

Got the final product a few weeks later...

Now I just need to figure out how to sell these things...

Evolve:
The name 'Evolve' represents a few things for me...

My evolution as a songwriter and producer...

My hopes for an evolving industry... that may some day actually catch up with the rest of the planet in terms of technology... and might eventually (whole heartedly) adopt the concept of music distribution in alternate forms.

Also, my hopes for somewhat of a revolution in the recording industry regarding independent artists and their relevance and importance to the industry as a whole.

Using internet music piracy as an excuse for dwindling sales by the majors, is a poor excuse for an industry that has bent itself on churning out cookie cutter bands year after year... in hopes of milking every last drop from tired old genre's and styles that should have died out years ago.

I'm tired of majors deciding what I like to listen to...

And finally, an evolution in music in general. I'd really like to have music focused on as an art form again rather than a business... If it's well done and honest it should create it's own business and should be nurtured and supported positively.

There's a lot of really amazing music out there that nobody will ever hear...

The Future:
That's the whole story so far...

I'm beginning to form new music ideas and am planning to start on them... after the promotion of my latest release.