David Fox

Interview by Brian Cowell.

For many on the K2000 USER GROUP, this man has been the main "artery" of communication to Kurzweil itself. Formulating the very backbone of the company's responses, he is known as the "Official" voice of Kurzweil. He is David Fox.

Recently, SONIK managed to "cage the FOX" and ask him a few questions.

SONIK : What is your job title at Kurzweil?

DAVID : Well, Young Chang is not very good about providing official titles, but if I did have one appropriate to what I do, it would be Manager of Online Support and Web Design.

I answer all of the email that comes to Kurzweil. I also designed the current web site, including layout, graphics, and almost all of the text. I write tutorials and video scripts, and proofread the manuals, and create various other support materials. I also handle a small amount of phone support calls.

SONIK : How many years have you worked at Kurzweil?

DAVID : I go back to the original Kurzweil Music Systems, Inc.

I have been here over 11 years, although I did have a brief nine month stint at Roland in 1990.

SONIK : How did you become employed at Kurzweil David?

DAVID : I am very good friends with Geoff Gee, who was one of our soundware engineers (he still does voicing for us, as a consultant). He is responsible for many of the preset programs in our products, going back to the 1000 series, and is an amazing synth programmer.

This was back when the K250 was the main Kurzweil product, and the first 1000 series modules were just being released. Needless to say I was in awe that he got to work with a product like the K250 - anyone old enough to remember hearing one or trying it in a music store when it first shipped will tell you of the utter amazement of hearing those incredible acoustic instrument samples, especially the piano.

Anyway, Geoff told me of an opening for a product specialist. I was stunned to even learn that there was such a position. I had been into synths since I was a kid - I had studied electronic music at Berklee and had been programming synths for bands I played in. At the time, I owned a Roland Juno 60 and a DX-7 (though I can't claim to be a very good FM synth programmer). It simply never occurred to me that you could call up a company and get help from someone on how to use the instrument - I had figured things out by reading manuals and diving into programming the unit.

At that time I was playing in a cover band, and so of course one of the challenges for the keyboard player was to reproduce the synth and keyboard sounds from the original recording. So there was always a lot of sound editing to do. I had also spent a number of years teaching piano. So I had both the experience with synths and experience with explaining things to people.

For years, I had been gigging very steadily and also keeping a day job doing some computer programming, and I had been trying to figure out what I could do to make the music world a larger part of my life. So this was a real revelation - I knew I could do the job well, and the idea of working with Kurzweil products (especially the 250) was enough to make any keyboard player's mouth water.

So I went in for an interview, and then it took them several months to decide between me and someone else, who was working there temporarily and already knew the products - which gave him a great advantage over me. However, this other guy had a somewhat abrasive personality, and eventually they decided to give me the position.

I'll never forget the feeling of disbelief I had in the first week, when I took a K250 home to start learning - this was product that cost about $12,000 at the time!

Needless to say it wasn't in my budget for musical instrument purchases!

One other funny thing - while I was waiting those months for them to decide on who they would hire, I would call up Geoff fairly regularly to see if he had heard anything. One day I called up and he was in a meeting with Jennifer Hruska (whom you already interviewed). I had actually given Jennifer some piano lessons when she first moved to Boston, but had lost track of her and had not spoken to her in a couple of years. So it was great to hook up with her again. And now, eleven years later, after all three of us have moved several different times, including to the other end of the country, Geoff, Jennifer, and I live in the same town - less than 5 minutes from each other, and we are all still friends.

SONIK : Can you tell us about your time with ROLAND?

DAVID : I worked briefly for Roland. I went to work there because I had moved from the Boston area to the Los Angeles area in order to get married (my fiance' lived there). And I was able to get a job as a product specialist at Roland.

Although I believe it has changed considerably in more recent years, at the time Roland was an absolutely horrible place to work (though of course I didn't know it when I signed on). The management at the time treated their employees with absolutely no respect- the entire place was run on fear and negativity. As a result, many talented people did not stay very long, and these days there are TONS of ex-Roland product specialists working successfully at other companies in our industry.

It was also a very stressful job because of the sheer number of phone calls. On some days, you would come in and immediately start answering phones, always having someone on hold waiting to talk to you the moment you finished one call, and it would be like that all day long, without a break. Very wearing.

It was during this time that I had moved, that the old Kurzweil Music Systems, Inc. went bankrupt and was bought by Young Chang. Very fortunately for me, Young Chang happened to be located in the same area as Roland, so I saw the chance to jump back to Kurzweil (and even cut a few miles off my horrendous Southern CA. commute).

However, I must say that one great thing about my experience at Roland was the challenge of having to learn all those products. At Kurzweil, I had only the K250, MIDIBOARD, K150, and 1000 series, and a few digital pianos in those days. On the other hand, as we all know, Roland churns out TONS of new products every year, and had been doing so for many, many years when I joined. I had two big shelves, completely full of manuals. And to try and figure out things from the manuals alone - well, lets just say it was a very daunting task. Roland manuals in those days were particularly bad, written originally in Japanese and then translated - in Japan - to English (or at least it was sort of English). I think they have improved a bit in recent years. Sometimes I would get a call from someone on an older product I had never even heard of. I would have to put them on hold, find the manual, and quickly look at it to quickly figure out what the heck the product was and then try and talk intelligently about it!

SONIK : Do you work along side a team in your office at TECH SUPPORT?

DAVID : We have three tech support people at Young Chang, although the other two aren't in my office. Jean Bellefeuille and Larry Hopkins work on the west coast.

We originally had all the tech support people in one office. However, about 5 years ago, my wife, who is a classical pianist decided to go back and work on her doctorate, so we moved for three years to Long Island, NY and I worked out of a home office. Then we moved back up to MA and since then I have been working out of the R&D offices, which have always stayed in the Boston area.

SONIK : Do you do any programming on the K2's?

DAVID : No. Of course, I have made my own programs, but there are much more talented programmers working in the soundware department.

SONIK : What music does David Fox listen to when he's at home?

DAVID : Not just at home - I listen to music regularly while working!

People walking by my office never know what the heck they are going to hear drifting out. I have a very large collection, and it is extremely diverse and eclectic. Buying CDs (and before that, LPs) is one of my few "vices" in terms of spending money. I think I have almost 700 CDs and a couple of hundred LPs at this point.

Almost half of my collection is classical music, with a particular emphasis in chamber music, and ranges from Baroque all the way to some wild 20th century stuff. I have a fair amount of jazz, mostly piano players, although I am also a major fan of Pat Metheny. I also have a lot of "world" music, in particular Brazilian, Tango (especially Astor Piazzola), and Celtic.

I have a fair collection of scores from movies - not the collections of songs that often pass as movie soundtracks, but real movie scores, by composers such as Nino Rota, Enio Morricone, Randy Newman and Jerry Goldsmith.

Of course, I have a lot of rock music, particularly from the 70s, when I was growing up - everything from Aerosmith to Zappa. I have a lot of progressive rock, which was the first music that I was totally into. I also have a lot of R&B oriented rock - I was in an R&B band for about 5 years and it was the most fun I ever had playing keyboards. I have a lot of stuff from singer-songwriter types - James Taylor, Paul Simon, Sting, Billy Joel, etc.

In addition, I have a very large collection of pop singers from the 40s and 50s - Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, etc. I spent a lot of years playing "standards" as a solo pianist in a piano bar setting, and I really love a lot of the song writing from that era and before. I am also a huge of fan of the American musical theater and have a lot of original Broadway cast albums, particularly Stephen Sondheim, whom I consider one the great genius songwriters of the 20th century.

I also have a lot of stuff that is simply too weird or oddball to categorize - for example, one of my favorites is The Juliet Letters, which is Elvis Costello with the Brodsky String Quartet, doing songs co-written by Costello and the quartet. What is it? Pop music? Not really. Contemporary chamber music? I suppose you could argue that, but it really doesn't fit there either. I especially like stuff that is able to successfully combine elements of very different styles of music in to one new whole. In fact, most of the stuff I have that was released in the 90s fits into this category - I find that I am just not that excited about most of the new stuff I hear on commercial radio these days. Maybe I am just getting old, but a lot of the songwriting on commercial radio these days just doesn't seem as varied or interesting as it used to be.

SONIK : What are your musical influences?

DAVID : Well, when I was first really getting into music in junior high and high school, I was strongly influenced by the various progressive rock keyboard players, such as Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, Tony Kaye, etc. I was studying classical piano at the time, so all of these keyboard players who were obviously well trained and had a great deal of technical proficiency and sophistication to their playing were very inspiring. Also, the groundbreaking synth work of Isao Tomita, Wendy Carlos, and Larry Fast got me hooked on synthesizers.

Once I went to Berklee, I spent a lot of time immersing myself in jazz. I was really drawn to Bill Evans, Keith Jarret, and Chick Corea. I also admire Lyle Mays, who I think has a wonderful sense for orchestration and sound. I also really admire Bill Payne from Little Feat.

SONIK : What hobbies do you have outside of music?

DAVID : I love the outdoors and love to hike, especially in the mountains. The best vacation my wife and I ever took was spending a week in Switzerland, hiking from place to place each day.

SONIK : Why do you choose, and why do you stay at Kurzweil?

DAVID : I just love our products. They have a sound that no one can beat, and the power of VAST is just amazing - ten years after it first came out, people are still finding new stuff to do with it. And I love working at R&D. The engineers here are an amazing, quirky group of people - and I know that no matter where I might go in the future, I will never find a work environment quite as unique as the one here. Almost all of the engineers are musicians too - for our Christmas parties instead of hiring a band, most everyone gets up and plays in different groups. It is a unique experience.

SONIK : Is this a job....or is it a deep musical appreciation that drives you?

DAVID : Well, of course it is a job. But obviously it is very satisfying to be working with these instruments as part of my job.

SONIK : What is the funniest thing you've seen on the K2000 USER GROUP the last couple of years?

DAVID : That's a hard one to answer. I have to say I have gotten a real kick out of watching the April Fools Day jokes being perpetrated.

SONIK : Do you have a list of "stoopid" questions which regularly pop up that you have to answer?

DAVID : No not really. Most of the questions that pop up over and over again are fairly straight forward. If you look at the list of FAQs on our web site, you will get a pretty good idea of the typical questions I get over and over. The really stupid ones tend to be unique - I have gotten some pretty bizarre email messages over the years. I suppose I should have saved them, but I never have, so I can't think of any really good ones right now.

Probably the most common "stupid" (and I say stupid only because it is an easy one for people to figure out themselves) questions is "My K2000 (or K2500) tells me the batteries are low. What should I do?" To which the answer is, of course, "Change the batteries". Of course, many keyboards don't allow you to change the batteries yourself, but it amazes me that these people never even bother to try looking in the manual in the Index under Battery Replacement, since we have clearly documented this.

I will, however, tell you my favorite tech support story. This did not actually happen to me, but it is a true story and happened to the guy who was the product specialist manager at the time I was at Roland. the product was the S-50, one of Roland's early samplers. I have paraphrased slightly, but the following is essentially the conversation:

Tech Support: Hello, how can I help you?

Customer: My Sampler doesn't work.

Tech Support: Well, can you tell me what is wrong with it?

Customer: I was using it, and now it won't play.

Tech Support: Can you tell me what you were doing before it stopped playing?

Customer: I was sampling electricity.

Tech Support: (Confused) Do you mean you were trying to sample a 60 cycle hum.

Customer: No, I was sampling electricity.

Apparently what this guy did was take a power cord and cut off the female end of it, then he soldered on a 1/4" jack onto that end. Then he plugged in the jack to the sampler, and plugged the other end into the wall outlet! The sampler was actually sent in to the Roland service department and the entire circuit board had been melted and components completely fried. Needless to say, this was not covered under warranty.

What really amazes me about this story is that the guy had enough knowledge to solder a 1/4" jack onto a cable, and yet appeared to be completely clueless about the consequences of trying to sample electricity. Of course, ever since hearing this story I have wondered what electricity really sounds like!

SONIK : Do you have days where Kurzweil seem to be copping a caneing on the K2000 User Group and you really have to bite your tongue?

DAVID : Well, I have learned over the years to not get too worked up over some of the more incendiary things that people write. It did take a while for me to get used to it, however. It always amazes me that people will send out message to a forum or mailing list that contains content or a "tone of voice" that they would NEVER use if they were talking to the person in the same room. Somehow, the non-directness of this type of communication seems to lead a certain percentage of people to think it is perfectly OK to be rude. Luckily, these are a very small percentage of people.

SONIK : Can you give us a typical day for DAVID FOX in the office?

DAVID : On average, I spend about half my day, sometimes more, responding to email. I get a ton of email, and each year the number goes up.

To give you an idea, in calendar 1998, I received about 15,000 emails directly, plus I read (and sometimes responded to) another 10,000 from the K2000 mailing list. Mondays are the worst because it will be three days of email, and also many people who work only get a chance to use their instruments on the weekends, so that is when their questions crop up. I also answer tech support phone calls as they come in, though luckily, there aren't too many of those (most go to our other tech support guys).

The rest of the time is filled with every other project that requires work - creating and editing web pages, proof reading manuals, writing tutorials, etc. I also spend a fair amount of time talking to the engineers when troubleshooting problems, or giving them feedback on user issues and feature requests.

SONIK : Do you feel pressured at times being the "Official" voice of Kurzweil?

DAVID : I'm not sure that "pressured" is the correct word However, I am very aware of the fact that what I write in emails and forums is indeed perceived by users as the official Kurzweil voice, and therefore I have to be very careful how I word things so that I am able to explain the companies position on various subjects.

I can remember one time when I got an email from someone with feature requests for the K2500. My response to this guy was "I will pass on your suggestions to our engineers". The next thing I know, this guy is complaining to the mailing list that Kurzweil doesn't want to listen to their users!

Apparently this guy read my message as "I will PASS on your suggestions..." (in other words, I'm not interested) instead of what I meant which was "I will pass along your suggestions...". So yes, I end up thinking about how I need to explain things to people.

SONIK : What other keyboards do you have?

DAVID : We have two grand pianos - a Steinway B (6' 10 1/2") and a Kawai 6'. I did have various other synths, but with the baby coming, I decided to simplify, and have sold all of my other stuff except for the current Kurzweil models.

SONIK : Do you have any favourite TV shows that you watch?

DAVID : I don't really watch any shows on a regular basis these days.

I mostly watch movies or rent them from a video shop. The last show I watched regularly (and never missed an episode if I could help it) was Babylon 5.

SONIK : I hear you are a father now?

DAVID : Not yet, but in about 6 weeks. Gulp!

SONIK, October 1999.