About the site

I needed a name. Band name generator to the rescue. Voila! We now have Enigmatic Airships, my blog about whatever. That said…

I’ve been a fan of music and audio technology for four decades. I was a teenager in the 1980s when synthesizer music really burst on the scene. I had to find out how it was made. By chance I found out that Keyboard Magazine existed and I bought my first issue, the June 1985 issue about programming synthesizers. I was hooked.

The gear has definitely changed over the years. Analog gear from the early 80s fell out of favor for digital synthesizers like the Yamaha DX-7, Roland D-50, etc. The industry went through what some would call the Dark Ages when programming went from knob-per-function to maybe a slider or two and a lot of menu diving.

That certainly has changed over the years as analog, and knob-per-function programming, came back into vogue and hasn’t gone away. In the meantime those old analog machines that you could buy for fire sale prices now can go into the 10s of thousands of dollars.

The great thing for those of us who can’t afford to spend $30,000 on an old analog keyboard that requires a lot of maintenance is that emulations of those old machines are available, sound great, and are cheap. DSP has come a long way. And for those who still want real analog that is available too, though not quite as cheap as the DSP-based stuff. It is far more reliable than the old stuff as we’ve come a long way since the 80s in circuit design and component production.

The same can be said about photography right? While many may rightfully lament the downfall of 35mm film I think differently. The rise of the mobile phone with a camera has opened up photography to so many people. In 2025, as in the audio technology space, we have an embarrassment of riches in the photography space. Whether that’s traditional (but digital) cameras, or phone cameras, never has it been such a good time to be into taking pictures.

My own journey started with my first iPhone, the 3GS, and Hipstamatic. As much as I’ve desired to get a Fujifilm digital camera, with it’s beautiful film styles, I’ve stuck with my iPhone, upgraded regularly, to take and edit my photos. Over the years I’ve amassed quite the collection of apps and subscriptions to feed my obsession 😂 

The old saying is that the best camera is the one you have with you and for me that is my phone and I’ve been lucky that Apple has done such a great job making meaningful updates to the camera system on the iPhone over the years. Between physical updates to the hardware, and computational photography made possible by updates to the phone’s processor, it has never been a better time to get into photography.

So, back to this blog. The original point of starting it was to write about those two subjects in their own space. I’m passionate about them. So what about the “blog about whatever” mentioned above? While I plan to write as much as I can about music tech and photography, I am also going to shift other writing over here, probably more “other writing” at first while I work on some posts in the other space.