Trading the newsroom for modular therapy

Patrick spent 21 years in the news business, most of it as a digital director running breaking news across social and digital platforms. When he and his wife landed in the Hollywood area, the city's easy creative hum, guitars in the elevators, music in the air, pushed him to look for something that felt like therapy. He picked up a Sub Phatty for that warm analog sound, then fell down a YouTube rabbit hole watching Celldweller demo a Hertz Donut and "rip universes" out of a wall of little modules. He had no idea what any of it was, only that he had to figure it out.

The synth shop and seven years of long distance

The turning point came with terrible timing. Two years into their LA life, his wife landed a TV news job in Tampa, and the day he dropped her at the airport he drove straight to Big City Music rather than drink his sorrows away in a bar. He sat in the back inventory room staring at a three-row case for half an hour, wondering how he'd ever make a sound, until someone reassured him that "you can plug anything into anything" and he wouldn't blow it up. He walked out with six modules and started the journey. Tampa became D.C. became a pandemic year with almost no visits, seven years of long distance in all, before he finally moved back to be with her.

The trumpet that's coming back

Patrick was a classically trained pianist, but it's the trumpet that shaped how he plays. Years of carrying the melody in high school and marching bands made him a melodic modular player, someone who thinks in lines and a little math and theory rather than pure improvisation, with a soft spot for the horn-section ballads of a band like Chicago. Late last year he picked up a flugelhorn and started practicing every day, rebuilding his aperture and endurance from the twelve years he played as a kid. He hasn't told many people, but he's hoping to release something later this year that finally merges brass and modular into one performance.

Talking his way into Noise Engineering

His entry into the company was pure persistence. He got his first NAMM pass from his hairstylist and wandered the booths, where he found Stephen McCaul running Noise Engineering solo with a table of purple-panel prototypes and an infectious way of explaining synthesis. Patrick kept crossing paths with him at Analog Haven performance nights and eventually just offered to help, because he genuinely loved the products. That turned into four or five years of contract demo videos, filmed with the good lighting and sound he'd honed on Instagram's new 15-second video format, and finally a full-time remote role in 2021 doing social, demos, testing, and playing hype man for every new module.

Synthesizers among the wedding parties

Modular on the Mall was something Patrick built himself, inspired by Rodent's Modular on the Spot in LA. Walking the National Mall on visits to his wife, he kept eyeing the World War I memorial, a marble bandstand that John Philip Sousa inaugurated in 1930, and realized the Park Service issues permits there, almost all of them for weddings. So the feed of that memorial runs wedding, wedding, wedding, then a cluster of synthesizers and cables and LEDs, then wedding again, and one couple even held their ceremony on the lawn while the show went on. Placing artists in the center of the dome, which acts like a subwoofer, and having his wife orbit them with a gimbal turned the whole thing into a document worth chasing, complete with soccer players, tourists, and confused Segway tours drifting through the background.

The Noise We Send, and what broadcast lost

Last year Patrick finally raided his hard drives and put out five or six albums of tracks that had been sitting for years, and "The Noise We Send" is a three-track EP pulled from that dig. "It's Going to Be Okay" came from a pandemic session in LA, self-cut Eurotrash haircut and all, testing a multicam rig with a brand-new 12-tap delay he couldn't wait to record. The closer was a long-form ambient piece scored to memories of riding his bike through a dark, empty San Francisco at 5 a.m. He named the record for the change he watched overtake broadcast after two decades in it, an industry throwing off noise and clutter, its familiar shapes dissolving, which is why the cover leans on TV towers.

Going deeper instead of wider

Patrick's whole performance instinct comes from the Modular on the Spot ethos of carrying everything in one case, so he almost never plays with external gear and stays "in the box." He's owned a Digitakt that sat in its box and a Sub Phatty he keeps meaning to bring out, but his real goal is to go deeper with what he already has rather than spend on the next system. He loves the three-module challenges he co-hosted during the pandemic precisely because stripping a setup down to three modules lets you actually see a technique and let it inspire your own. It's like finding new modules inside the modules you already own, and he'd rather learn those hidden corners, and maybe MIDI, than chase a new format.