Dave Bristow was born in London and began to study music on the piano at
an early age. He graduated from university with a BSc in Psychology but
turned his musical talents full-time to keyboards and has worked both as
a professional player and in the music business ever since. He played a
key role voicing the well-known DX7 synthesizer and indeed most of
Yamaha's FM synthesizers up to and including the SY99, and is
internationally recognized as one of the important contributors to the
development and voicing of FM synthesis, co-authoring a text-book on
the subject with Dr John Chowning called "FM Theory and Applications".
Dave has toured the world as a professional synth demonstrator teaching courses on synthesis and related acoustics in Europe and
the USA, and spent three years at IRCAM in Paris, running a MIDI and
synthesis studio. He moved to the United States in 1995 to work with the
electronic music company Emu Systems, Inc. producing sampling based
synthesizers. Following that in 2002, he began working again with Yamaha
as a consultant, focusing on the introduction and support of their MA
hybrid audio chip series for cell-phones and the SMAF mobile devices
format. More recently he ran and developed a non-profit community music
school for four years on Bainbridge Island, and now spends his time teaching
electronic music production and synthesis, privately and at Shoreline
Community College and composing and playing with the "BBC" jazz trio.
SOME HISTORY AND PERSONAL COMMENT...
The mysteries associated with why and how we hear music have always intrigued me, and Sound Design has been a big part of my life. Even when I didn't realize it, I was interested in and experimenting with audio and musical sounds, building instruments or squishing audio with a couple of twin speed "Elizabethan" tape recorders, way back in the 60's. What I remember most about those old machines was the smell of the magnetic tape on the 5" reels... That's me in the picture, by the way, with my Chapman Stick. I bought this wonderful instrument in 2004 because, I had convinced myself that it might be easier to learn a new, portable and light instrument than to continue lugging electric pianos and keyboards of various shapes and sizes up and down stairs. Hhmm, it's too late to save my aching back - and I'm still a novice on the Stick, so maybe it wasn't such a bright idea....
I discovered that I had an affinity with synths back in the
mid-seventies and spent many hours working part time in the local music
store pretending to sell them. Probably, I was subconsciously more
interested in keeping the customers out so that I could experiment
in peace with all that wonderful sound making gear. Particularly
interesting at that time was the Yamaha CS80 - a big, polyphonic analog
synthesizer. As a piano player, I was never very forgiving of the early
synth's major limitations - you could only play one note at a time and
there was no response to touch - but the CS80 tried to deal with those
issues. You could play 8 notes simultaneously, and volume and timbre
were responsive to touch - both velocity touch and individual
after-pressure applied to a key. In addition, there was a long ribbon
strip placed just above the keys that could be used to control pitch,
making the CS80 a very organic and expressive electronic instrument. It
was also extremely heavy, very expensive, drifted in and out of tune
easily (some folks seemed to like that, deeming it "natural") and had a
tendency to explode if you plugged the foot pedals incorrectly into
their sockets (I did that), so it had its downside. Nonetheless it seduced me into the world of
electronic music. Sounds of the CS80 are scattered liberally all over
the 2nd Vision album I was recording at the time. It was however, only a hint of the things to come,
as I was unwittingly lured into the world of synthesizer development and
voicing.
In 1980, I made my first visit to the Yamaha Factory in Japan. That was
something. I was there to do a little voicing on a new analog keyboard
and get "introduced" to the GS1 - Yamaha's first commercially available
FM synthesizer. It was also on this visit that I met Gary Leuenberger
who was to become a firm friend and voicing buddy. Well, to cut a (very)
long story short, for the next twelve years or so, supported by an
enjoyable and strong relationship with Yamaha, I became completely
immersed in FM synthesis, synthesizer programming, electronic music,
demonstrations, travel and also academic music, thanks to my time spent
at IRCAM. Some little bits of the story
have popped up in various dusty corners of the music press and internet,
where you can find a little about my DX exploits with Gary. In the early
90's, I was lucky to have the opportunity to learn something new - this
time about sampling and filters, by joining Emu Systems in the USA,
which rounded out my appreciation of electronic music synthesis (and gave
me a tiny peep into corporate america...)