NORTHSTAR PRODUCTIONS

Where we came from: Located near the western slopes of northwestern Oregon's beautiful Mount Hood, Northstar Productions was established by Scott James Hybl in the mid 1980s. While working on his album Brick, Scott acquired an E-MU Emulator II, and found the then-available sample libraries to be simple and uninteresting. From his musician's point of view, rather than an electronics engineer's one, Scott developed and expanded on his own collection of sound recordings, and began offering for sale floppy disks with useable, musical and comprehensive banks of sounds. Before the end of that decade, he had issued his first of several products for a new technology-the CD ROM.