Matthew Herbert has been playing music for as long as he can remember; taking up the piano and violin at the tender age of four. His father was a sound engineer for the BBC, and as a result, the young Herbert was exposed to his extensive collection of musical gadgetry that lay around the home. At school, a music teacher heavily into jazz and pioneering composers such as Steve Reich gave Matthew musical insights that were beyond his years. At University, he studied drama in a conscious effort to avoid classical music training, it was here that he first began to use sampling techniques in an exploration of the relationship between music and performance. It was around this time when Matthew began considering releasing some of the music he had been producing over the years.

In late 1995, he released the house inflected ‘Herbert - Part One’ single (Phono). A few months later in January 1996, there followed another three releases; ‘Herbert - Part Two’ in addition to material under two different pseudonyms - the abstracted techno of ‘Wishmountain’, and jazzy electro of ‘Dr Rockit’. 1997 saw the first release as ‘Radioboy’, representing the common elements of each of his former monikers, taken to sonic extremes. These unique angles on electronic music were a refreshing breath of fresh air amongst row upon row of unimaginative tat lining record shop shelves. Taking cues from the ‘musique concrete’ movement, a large part of Matthew’s music incorporated every day sounds, extrapolated from their usual context by use of sampler and applied to the formula of dance music in it’s varying forms. With high acclaim from both punters and fellow producers alike, Matthew found himself in demand - notably for his work as ‘Herbert’, and his considerable remixing talents. In addition to his electronic / dance productions, Matthew set about composing music for several feature film soundtracks - something he has maintained an active interest in since leaving University. However, Matthew Herbert is perhaps best known for his stunning live performances, in which he incorporates live sampling of seemingly anything he can get his hands on, including bottles, bikes, stones, radios, and cameras, to name a few. As Herbert, he takes vocalist Dani Siciliano and pianist Phil Parnell on the road with him and presents his ‘Wobbly’ perspective on house music - sampling Dani’s vocal in real time and manipulating samples gathered on the spot. Whilst in his own words he was ‘never supposed to be a DJ’, Matthew has played out in at over 300 clubs and events over the last five or six years, and travelled across the globe in the process.

For some reason, just having Cubase VST Virtual Instruments turned ON uses your processor. BY ON I mean switched to power ‘ON’ and not even playing a single note. I noticed this when my CPU became at spiked at 100% when I had 7 heavy duty VST instuments running. Only one was actually playing the necessary notes. Since, I really only needed to use only one (1) instrument anyway, so after subsequently turning each unused instrument off I regained 5% of CPU for each VST disabled. This was performed on a Windows 2000 Server running Cubase 5.0 R6. Your mileage may vary depending on your system.