Andrew Tokuda has been banging away at anything that made noise since he was 2 years old. At the age of four, his parents thought it might be a great idea to have him learn to play the piano. Years later, the child non-prodigy has taken on the name, Droo, and the noises that bubbled in that brain of his, has magically found its way through expensive digital toys, into this wonderful thing called "mp3."
Since 1999, Droo has written and recorded music music electronically, employing both traditional and synthesized sounds. What started as a hobby soon became a semi-professional career, and his sounds were heard on games, websites, and television commercials.
Several of Droo's songs were made available to Web surfers via the defunct MP3.com, and were compiled into an enhanced CD titled, "The MacAddict Years," which mostly consisted of short-form songs written for the Macintosh magazine's monthly CD-ROM. Most of these songs have been remastered and made available at http://www.digitaldroomedia.com, where they can be purchased for mere pennies.
Droo produces all his music on a Dual 2 GHz Power Mac G5 running Apple Logic Pro. In the past, he had racks of hardware samplers, sound modules and effects, but most of his sounds now (besides vocals and acoustic instruments) come from software-based instruments. "My main source of sounds come from samples loaded into Emagic's EXS24. This software-based sampler literally saves me hours of production time compared to a hardware sampler which requires loading new sounds every time I switch songs. With software, it's virtually instant and automatic. Thanks to the amazing technology of Macintosh computers, I'm inspired to write and record more music, and I can do it with much more productivity than I ever could before."
