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contact name:Joel Bennett
phone: 086 1723989
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Full Name: Joel R. Bennett
Date of Birth: June 25th 1980
Place of Birth: Accrington, Lancashire, England

My family moved to Ireland when I was 11 years old, but even before we moved here I had gathered some experience that shaped my thinking. First of all, it's worth mentioning that I had always had a computer. When I was very young I had a Spectrum, when I was 5 an Amstrad 6128, 6 an Amstrad 1512, 7 an Amiga 500+, so I was as much into them as you can be at that age. Along the way my dad had invested in a small Yamaha keyboard which we had hooked up near (or occasionally to) the Amiga. I enjoyed fiddling with it and tried to learn the main parts of my favourite game tunes (Shadow of the Beast, Xenon 2) and other music I enjoyed, but didn't get into it seriously at that stage. My serious instrument at that time was the flute, which I was learning in school. I had also had contact with Brass instruments, but had changed to and preferred the quieter wind variety :)The other thing that helped develop my tastes was that my family is very musically minded. My dad plays guitar and always encouraged us to play instruments as well. We had a CD Player in 1982, which is when they first came out in England and between my parents it pretty much never stopped playing everything from the great 70's music like YES, Camel, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin to easy listening, classical and country. My favourite flute based tune was a track called Rhayder on the album Snow Goose by Camel.
Unfortunately, when we moved, I had to give up the flute as it belonged to the school. During the next few years I remained very much into computers, dabbling in programming and so on, but mostly I played games and as I played more and more, I really began to enjoy the variety of music and the different sounds that the music in games offered. When I was 15, I got a keyboard (Yamaha PSR-310) for myself, choosing it over a flute, because I thought it would prove more flexible. Almost immediately after getting it, I was hooking it up to a 4 track recorder we had and putting down ideas I had on tape. When we got a PC, I discovered MIDI and proceeded to experiment with that. I wasn't good enough at the time to record anything amazing, but I recorded what ideas I had and really from that point on I have just practiced, improved and matured as a player and composer.

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