Friday June 5 1992, late, somewhere in North London. I finish watching a video of Terminator 2, a movie whose plot revolves around the premise that humans are heading for an apocalyptic war with machines, and sit down at my Wavestation for a little nocturnal noise generation. As I switch on my Mac, MIDI Merger, mixer, effects units, and one or two other synths, I suddenly realise that I've been waging my own war against machines for some time.

I mean, think of the times that crashes in programs have destroyed work (yes, I know I should have saved and backed up...), the hours spent wrestling with new software to actually find a way of making it make my life easier, the time that I've spent getting to grips with a new synth in order to actually coax some decent new sounds out of the thing...

The thought sends me reeling all the way to the fridge; in an act of pointless revenge for all this grief, I look for something metal to take it out on. I rip the head off a can of Grolsch, and feel a whole lot better for it.

Sound management has caused me quite a few headaches in the past, as I'm not always as conscientious as I should be about keeping track of what sounds are used on a particular track. Opcode's Galaxy has recently come to my rescue, however, integrating sound organisation with sequencing. Galaxy's arrival was well timed, coinciding as it did with my adoption of a slightly new approach to loading up my synths with new sounds; I now keep the lower numbered memory locations stuffed with my essential, basic sounds, and wipe the rest. This means that, when I need another sound, I either have to program something new, or look through my complete library on hard disk for a patch that's just right, rather than settling for an OK-ish sound that happens to be in memory at the time. No goddamn machine is going to tell me what sound to use; it has to be the other way round. These silicon fiends need to be put in their place.

A final thought: I realised long ago that the sound of an acoustic piano had become very important to me. This rather surprised me at the time; I was attracted to synths because they sounded like nothing on earth, not because they could sound like pianos. Nevertheless, the piano is, after the human voice, perhaps the most important sound in the whole of Western music, and like most people I find that I write the basics of many of my songs with a piano-based patch. Julian Colbeck's look at digital pianos should, therefore, be a very useful article, and one which is certainly not out of place in a hi-tech magazine.