Are You Part of Generation Y? Then Read the Story of the iPad DJ

I want to tell my story honestly.A little bit about me. I am 27 years old. I am an artist and an engineer, a musician and a technologist. I have never done a drug in my life, never smoked a cigarette, and seldom drink. I do what I do for the love of music and computers. To my ears, electronic music is the perfect fusion of man and computer, art and science. It is the soundtrack to the working environments of top programmers and technical talents all around the world. It is the synthesis of art and technology, and it’s a form of expression I find to be emotional and stirring that is created with as much compositional care as any other type of music. Listen to Skrillex’s work arranged for orchestra and you will hear this for yourself. I believe that if Mozart were alive today, he would be using electronics to create music.

The story of how I “became” The iPad DJ has been told many times. In a nutshell, I posted an impromptu YouTube video of myself using an iPad to mix and play music and suddenly received more attention than I ever anticipated, wanted, or could handle.

And yet, in the year after that video, “the iPad DJ” attended the Grammy awards, drank Cristal on stage with Jermaine Dupri, and toured the world playing over 200 shows, for Apple, Google, Microsoft, The White House Correspondents Dinner, TED and more. Without an agent or publicist to guide me, I found myself introduced by the Prime Minister of Lithuania before my keynote address at that country’s National Gallery of Art. I was the basis for a CSI:NY episode, ate lunch with engineers at Apple’s campus at least once a month for nearly a year, and was master of ceremonies for Kia Motors’ press announcement at the New York Auto Show. When Wired magazine asked Steve Wozniak about me, he responded, “I wish I’d had that much talent and energy when I designed computers!” It’s hard to imagine anything more surreal — or higher pressure — than that.