My name is Richard Knight and my DJ / Artist name is Metrafaze. Here is a little about me…
Born: June 1980
Sex: Male
Location: Essex, United Kingdom
Decks: Pioneer DDJ-1000
DAW: Cubase 12 Pro
Favourite Plugin: Serum
I specialise but am not limited to DJing and producing Drum and Bass. I am also known for DJ’ing and producing House tracks.
I started out making music as far back as I can remember as my father had an old keyboard back in the 80’s that I used to muck around on as a kid. I then had a little Casio PT-100 bought for me one Christmas and I then caught the music making bug! For many years I used to just muck around learning songs until one day my father bought me a Casio HT-700 keyboard. This really opened my eyes to sound engineering as I was able to use the features built into the keyboard to manipulate my own sounds. From there I moved on to using Yamaha keyboards such as the PSR-310 which had a midi interface. I would rig it up to my other Casio keyboard and that is where the experimenting started!
In 1993 when I was gifted my first PC by my mother. It was a Packard Bell 486 DX-2 66MHz running Windows 3.1. I went to Dixons and purchased the legendary Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card and got it installed. With a freshly loaded copy of Voyetras Digital Midi Orchestrator installed I started to produce tracks and learning the trade! (Both Music Production and I.T.). I then purchased a copy of Cubase (v2 I think) and produced mostly house tracks just for fun.
I would go on to produce many casual tracks that I would play to my friends at School with mostly positive feedback.
Once School and College was out of the way, I kind of lost touch with my musical making life. Real life circumstances changed and as like many, I was forced to move on and earning a living. It wasn’t until I moved to Billericay in Essex when I started to catch the bug again!
I got to know a good friend named Paul (DJ Xception) who was really into DJ’ing. Much like me, he was into his Jungle and Drum and Bass. I would often visit his house to do some sets on his Technic 1210’s with him and would assist in sound engineering and maintaining his PC. There are many sets floating around the place dating back to 2004 and earlier! In turn he would come and visit me at my place and we would have hours of recording sets and having a laugh!
Whilst I continued to build PC’s and started working in I.T. I still didn’t have the time or the cash to get back into Production properly. It was at this point I decided to get into DJ’ing.
I started doing Drum and Bass sets for a music sharing platform called Oldskool Arena. (OSA). I streamed live on the Internet with the likes of Cybergroove, DK, Firebird and Dreadnought. After a couple of years I formed my own online station through Shoutcast called United Networks. This was formed of many DJ’s all similarly minded and we went on to produce live streams for several years.
In 2012 my life changed for the better when my partner Jill gave birth to our daughter Katie. Although I still made the occasional track here and there my music time was mostly limited to DJ’ing.
After 8 years, time has become a little more friendly to me and I have started music production again. This is where my musical life story continues to this day…