Heath Close
Thanks for showing interest in who I am and what I’m all about. I’ll give you the short version first, then if you really want to know more, the long version is below.
The Short Version
Hi, I’m Heath Close. I’m a -
- Music Producer
- Owner of an Independent Record Label, 4Arm Records
- Studio Owner
- Blogger
…and above all, a musician.
I’m self educated on how to make music across multiple platforms and softwares.
I own roughly 9 different DAWs (Digital Audio Workstation), and am proficient in all them including Pro Tools, Logic, Ableton, Reason, Record, Grageband, Cakewalk Sonar, Project 5, and Melyodyne Studio, spanning from the PC to a Mac, and plan to master more as my resources allow.
I know how to use them all, and I’m going to show you how, too. You need to learn one of those? I will teach you. You want to cut an album on your computer? I will help you make that happen. I have learned a lot from the days of “tinker distraction”, and InTheBoxProduction.com is the culmination of everything I have to teach to those musicians looking to learn their software so they can concentrate on creativity.
The Long Version.
I’m not a prodigy.
Passion for music didn’t start as early for me as some people. I don’t have that “prodigy” story. I didn’t start playing the drums at 3, I didn’t master the oboe at 6, and I didn’t pick up a guitar in my third trimester. In fact, my mother made me and my sister take piano lessons when we were young and I hated it. HATED IT. I look back on it now, and I think it’s because we were being forced to.
I did dabble.
In grade school however, I wanted to learn how to play the drums, but when I started taking lessons, I was given this boring practice pad so I would “keep the noise down”, I guess. Anyway, big turn off, so I didn’t continue with it. Even though my grandfather played drums, and I had the bug, too, it wasn’t until I was in my 30’s that I was able to finally get a drum set.
So later in grade school I moved on to trombone. Don’t even remember why, but it was cool. I don’t even remember why I stopped, but eventually, the trombone wasn’t interesting anymore either.
My first love…
High school came along, and I was from a very small farm town in rural Illinois. We moved to a larger town so I could play sports in High School…and at that high school, I heard it.
Metal.
Wow.
That moved me. We didn’t have that where I came from…no kidding. Actually my very first album was “Put the Hammer Down” on tape. My dad brought that home from Radio Shack for me one day, because he knew I was into Semi Trucks, and the whole album revolved around Trucking. To this day, those songs are burned into my soul, and after all these years, I was able to find that album on vinyl. I used to play that tape out when we would go on family vacations, and I know every word of every song verbatim.
Back to high school and the discovery of Metal. The voices…the guitars…the drum beats…it was addicting. Metallica, Suicidal Tendencies, and Anthrax were the big three to me. I didn’t really get into Slayer until later in life, and now is one of my favorites.
Not just metal…
Not a metal fan? The story doesn’t stop here, and neither did my adventure in discovering more music. Eventually, like a lot young people, I finally had my own wheels, and a stereo. It was a stereo on wheels. My income from the jobs I had in high school went straight into hearing my music better and louder.
So now that I had a stereo on wheels, I needed to hear Run D.M.C. on those Infinity speakers. I needed to hear Beastie Boys on those speakers. Paul’s Boutique and Tougher than Leather couldn’t get loud enough. It didn’t stop there. Living Colour, INXS, the list goes on, and becomes more eclectic.
Off to college…
So I finished high school. Off to college I went. Sir Mix A Lot’s “Baby Got Back” prompted yet another album purchase, and that was way different. That album was a set of unique stories set to beats that crinked my neck, and I was obsessed with feel of his voice and the production of the album.
…and then I heard it.
More and more music came my way, until eventually, I found myself in a dorm room at NIU in DeKalb, IL. I was doing homework, trying to anyway. I kept hearing bubbles. Yah. Bubbles. It was coming from above me, and I had no idea what that sound was, but it sounded cool.
I met a girl on my floor who was friends with some guys that lived on the floor above us. She invited me to go hang out upstairs, so I went. Guess what. I found the bubbles. A keyboard. That’s what I was hearing. It was a Yamaha V50. Cool sounds and what I would later learn is it had onboard sequencing, but that wasn’t the coolest discovery in that dorm room. They threw in some music…and then I heard it.
Electronica.
Wow.
That not only moved me, but called me home. The Orb, Orbital, Ultraworld, Deep Forest and more.
Metal and Electronica were melting together, I didn’t know where one began and the other ended.
Material, Praxis, NIN, Pigface and more.
I didn’t just discover…actually, I wasn’t just shown electronica, I was being shown the gateway to very music that inspired me. I was sold.
I wanted to make music, and I wanted to make music for a living.
A music producer was born…
So I started to tinker on that Yamaha V50. I wanted to sequence “Moonlight Sonata” with some whacky sounds. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. I spent some time during college trying to memorize Moonlight Sonata. I could never get this one part, so to this day, I just know the beginning.
I changed my major, which didn’t exactly make my Dad an instant fan, because I didn’t choose a music major. No, for that I would have needed preparation. That trombone would have had to stick, or maybe those Piano lessons, or that practice pad. Nope. I changed my major to Philosophy.
Not a real winner with my parents, they were concerned I may starve to death, but I knew that if I wanted to make music that was going to achieve something other than sounding pretty, if I wanted to actually use music as a vessel to change lives, I needed to understand more about myself and my reality, the world, and people.
So I dove in head first.
So my journey began. Since I didn’t have the life long culmination of lessons on an instrument, electronic music was my gig. It was, anyway, the music that spoke to me most. A perfect match. So where do I start?
ASR-10. That’s where I started. One of those guys in that room of discovery eventually became one of my roommates, and had bought an Ensoniq ASR-10. I eventually bought that sampler from him and turned the upstairs of the house we all lived in to our performance area / studio / TV room. It was great. Tinker, tinker, tinker. I needed to learn that thing inside and out. Tinker, tinker, distraction, get lost…you know that feeling?
You have every intention of making music, but you get lost in how good everything sounds or how impressed you are with the riff you just came up with that nothing really ever goes anywhere. Anyway.
I did also end up picking up the guitar and writing songs. Watching me…or rather listening to me play guitar isn’t that impressive. I don’t pretend to be a guitar player.
Enter the PC…
So, that was how it all started. I eventually moved into making music on a computer, and now my toys are far more expensive and far more advanced than the days of hardware keyboards and samplers, although those have advanced along the way as well, I prefer to work “inside the box”, a term used to refer to making music on a computer as opposed to traditional analog hardware.