Paul Shillito
Yep, that’s me, founder of Classitronic.net and part time classical electronic synth interpreter.
I first became interested in electronic music when I was about 12 years old, my parents would have on BBC Radio 4 (a major UK station), it isn’t a pop music station like Radio 1 and so i used to hear an organ music recital show and they would play the Golliwogs calkwalk from Tomita’s snowflakes are dancing album and believe me that was radically different to organ music !.
This got me interested in this new strange and wonderful sounding music, I used to listen to Radio 1 on Saturday afternoons to Fluff Freeman and he would play Tomita, Kraftwerk, ELP, Tangerine Dream, Camel etc all were using synths and I couldn’t get enough of it, so much so I made synth as my metal work project at school, I was also well in electronics too, I couldn’t play it but it made some great noises.
My first LP was Isao Tomita – Pictures at an Exhibition, closely followed by Snowflakes are Dancing then rest of Tomita’s releases as they came along
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Then in the mid 1980′s they just dried up, the last one I bought as an LP as opposed to CD much later was Live at Linz but I couldn’t understand why he just seem to disappear. Only much later did i find out that RCA had decided had pulled the plug after management changes, leaving Tomita pretty much Japan based.
Fast forward 20 odd years from those first days in the 70′s and I was in a position to buy some synths and effects I though I’d have a go at doing what I had only dreamed of before and making my own music like Tomita, some of those earlier tracks I have made available via Youtube, soundcloud and now here.
I stopped again for about 10 years and then restarted early 2009. I still had some bits left from my old synth collection but this time I decided to go almost completely virtual and use soft synth’s and effects. Things had moved on a lot since the late 90′s, computer power and the quality of the programming meant that soft syth’s were as good as the hardware versions.
(Edit Sept 2010) I did use softsynths alot during 2009 but I found that the methods of working with computer based synths was just not intuitive so I decided to change to hardware so now I have an analogue modular, Arturia Origin, Roland V-Synth GT, Creamware Pro-12 and Prodyssey, Alesis Micron. these along with external hardware effects boxes have now replaced the softsynths and I have a much better handle on the method of making the music now. At one time I would have said that you cant beat analogue only but after working with these new synths I find that they can be easily as good as analogue for many things though analogue still rules in absolute tweekablity.
So here I am, I love making new version of my favourite classical music, I tend to favour the 20th Century or modernist/impressionist composers like Debussy, Satie, Ravel, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Saint Saens with music I like and think I can do a good job with but that’s the beauty of the classics, even the more boring ones can be transformed when you apply a new sound pallet to them and with synths and imagination the possibilities are almost limitless.
