User:Geniusnick

This information pertains to The GeniusNick Creative Design Lab Located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It all began back in 1995 when I started to really listen to music that I was playing from outside the box. Previously used tapes, various instruments and reel-to-reel machines made up the brain of sort of a half-finished basement atmospheric sound that really didn't provide for much good audible recordings; we tried different basements as well, just resulting in further analysis that what we were doing was incorrect.

The audio came first, since it was my passion (still is) for playing music and experimenting with new sounds, I learned to multi-track audio and overdub quite quickly using a four track Dokorder Reel-to-Reel on loan from my Grandfather, an 8 channel Peavey Powered Mixer donated to the cause by my dad, and a small Sony voice recorder with an 1/8 inch input for the final mix, which I most likely found at a garage sale.

The inspiration for recording was brought on by listening to my step father's (at the time) 60's and 70's vinyl collection; of course the first song on vinyl I ever heard was "Voodoo Chile", from Jimi Hendrix' "Electric Ladyland" album. So I took a dive into classic rock for awhile, never forgetting my love for the songs of the 80's, 90's and so on. After high school I began to record other bands, in houses, at parties I don't remember, in small bars, etc.

At the time, The "Lab" was running all over the place but we had a small rental space we used for a studio up in Bolton, Ontario we could call home. At one point we had about 17 of my guitars, six keyboards/synths, 3 full drum kits, a whack of outboard rack mount gear, 2 analog and 2 digital mixers, a huge Tascam 16 track 1 inch tape machine, and tons of speakers (working, and not) crammed into about a 400 square foot space. Needless to say we recorded a lot of noise, but I distinctly remember that there were roughly 110 connections running into different machines.

During those audio sessions I began to dive into a different area of media which was graphic design, I had always had a love for computers since the early black and green and orange and green stages, before the internet stranglehold, around Windows 3.1, but they never really took grip until my love of the arts could take a more permanent shape, while fusing computers with music into more of a solid shape was somewhat of an easier thing for me to understand. So I began to design flyers and things for bands, merchandise kind of stuff and that sort of thing.

Getting into web design happened out of nowhere. I can't recall what prompted me to do so, it may have been a jumble of graphic design and music that led me there, but my first endeavor was an e-commerce website for selling record care products called Vinylhut.Ca. It took nearly 20 complete revisions and 7 months to get it right, at the time I was manually entering in product information into HTML templates I had created and linking them together with what was then, early stages of CSS 1.0. I spent a lot of time learning new programs as they came out, messing about with what I could do with them, and so on.

As the internet was passing it's "Boom" I was still learning from the failed website investments I had watched tumble over into the ground, and keeping an eye on the future (something I still do to this day), reading books and really getting into possibility (which in my mind is the "real" definition of the world wide web).

I had found my core, and mantra. A fusion between music, poetry, philosophy and data, the ultimate Karma, rich with integrity and personality; and riddled with complex and confusing mathematics, logic and perception - something I always searched for. I evolved from a "user" to a "developer" very quickly, so I decided to go to school once again after two previous attempts, Police Foundations and Musical Theory (so boring) that remained unsuccessfully completed. I finished up college while working freelance as a graphic/web designer, and I have been involved with great projects ever since.

We have been forefront to some great start ups and some wicked web applications, really fun projects and even some mundane, empty holes too. Recently I am becoming extremely familiar with mobile developments on their way from Japan and Europe to North America making their debut in so many directions. Social networking seems to further explode into a great data pool while GEO targeted advertising and location based mobile apps take the continent by storm.

The "Lab" remains intact with different members each playing their part, as the mystery of the web is finally unfolding into something almost delicately tangible.