Aether

Tell us about yourself and how you got into music?

My name is Jason Taylor, I’m a visually impaired music producer and composer hailing from Scotland. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a special connection with music. From a young age, when adults would ask me what I aspired to be when I grew up, my reply was always a rapper.

Thankfully my music taste changed a lot overtime and I never had to put many people through the experience of hearing me “rap”. Entering high school was when I found my love for electronic music and it’s been with me since, although it has mellowed down in style over time.

Tell us about your genre and style of music

There are a few projects that I’m working on at the moment, but my primary focus is my story driven concept I like to refer to as the Aetherverse. This is a lot different from my previous works as it’s the first time I’ve written music that is not based upon real life events. Creating my own “universe,” so to speak, was a much larger undertaking than I had imaged, having to create cause and effect for various events that tie in with the characters and setting.

During the writing process of the Aetherverse, I also ended up scouting for a visual artist. This was incredibly important to me as you can only portray so much of the ideas and concepts through music alone. I was super fortunate to have reached out and got a response from Sishenfan, a 20 year old Canadian visual artist who I found browsing through Pixiv, a japanese art website, where he was number one in the illustrations category. After working with him on my previous release “To Meet Is The Beginning Of Parting”, we decided that this project could bring out the best of us by pushing us in directions we had never been before.

Tell us about your visual impairment?

I was born with a condition known as Retinitis Pigmentosa, more commonly referred to as RP, which is a genetic visual impairment that I inherited through my Mother’s side of my family. It’s a disability that slowly deteriorates my vision until I am eventually fully blind. Fortunately I am yet to reach this severity, and hopefully never will, however my night vision has been affected the most and I’m more or less fully night blind at this point.

I do however still have the vision left to be able to work at my desktop setup which I am incredibly thankful for.

How did you start using FL Studio & what does it mean to your productions?

Near the end of high school I remember browsing through YouTube and there was one video I came across where someone was using FL Studio. This is what introduced me to FL Studio, it was on version 8 at the time. From there I ended having so much fun making silly drum loops and melodies. Once I finished high school, I went on to study sound engineering at Fife College, it was at this point where I decided to take it more seriously, and upgraded FL Studio 10 and acquired a few bits of gear to build a small setup.

FL Studio means a lot more to my productions that I give it credit for. Not only is it incredibly simple and fast to use, it’s interface is also very visual impairment friendly. Everything from the buttons on the toolbar highlighting a light blue when hovered over, to selected channels/clips/midi info highlighting bright green/red. Also can’t forget the GUI scaling. This all adds up to be more useful to me than any other DAW that I’ve tried, and since I’m so familiar with it at this point, it’s a powerhouse for getting my ideas down.

Tell us about your production environment & toys?

My production environment, which is in my bedroom, is a small rectangular space with acoustic treatment. As far as gear goes, my kit list is as follows.

Rig: Intel i7 6700k, 32GB Corsair Vengeance RAM, Asus Maximus VIII Hero, Asus NVIDEA GeForce GTX 1070.

Monitors: KRK Rokit 5 (Gen 2)

Headphones: Phillips Fidelio X2 (Sennheiser Momentum on ear’s for reference)

MIDI Keyboard: NI Kontrol S49

Microphones: Rode NT2-A, Zoom H5

Audio Interface: Focusrite Forte

Instruments: Faith Naked Venus electro acoustic and a collection of djembe drums.
I also use Philips Hue light bulbs to set moody atmospheres to enhance my writing sessions, may not sound important but it makes a difference!

Do you have any links you would like to share?

You can feel free to check out my musical works here:

soundcloud.com/aetheraudio

I can also be found on Twitter @AetherAudio and for everything else you can find it on my website:

aetheraudio.co.uk

Jason