BT / Biography

brian wayne transeau (born October 4, 1971 in Rockville, Maryland) is a music producer, composer, audio technician, singer and songwriter better known by his stage name, BT. He is a pioneering artist in the Trance genre. In recent years he has gained additional fame for producing several Hollywood film scores and the 2001 N'Sync - Pop.

BT is known in production circles for his signature technique, the stutter edit, also known as the BT stutter. This technique consists of taking a small sample of a sound and then repeating it rhythmically.

Transeau showed an early interest in music, playing the piano from the age of two and enjoying classical music. As an adolescent, he heard Electronic music such as New Order and Depeche Mode and began to love it. He received his first formal training in electronic sound synthesis at the Omega Studios School of Applied Recording Arts and Sciences in Rockville, MD. He attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts but dropped out after one or two semesters, moving to Los Angeles, California, where he found himself largely an outsider in the closed Los Angeles electronica community.

BT then moved back to the Washington, DC area where he had grown up and collaborated there with his friends Ali Dubfire and Sharam of Deep Dish in the early 1990s. Transeau's productions were not yet popular in the United States, and he had no idea that he had become a sensation across the Atlantic, where UK DJs like Sasha and Paul Oakenfold were regularly spinning his music for crowds. Sasha bought Transeau a ticket to London, where BT witnessed his own massive success; several thousand clubbers responded enthusiastically when Sasha played his song. He was soon signed to oakenfold's record label, a subsidiary of Warner. His British hits at this time were BT - A Moment of Truth and BT - Relativity, and it was during this time in the UK that BT met Tori Amos.

In the early years of BT's career (roughly 1995-2000), he became a pioneering artist in the Trance genre. Despite the fact that he is not truly a DJ and does not claim to be, BT has often appeared on the lists of the world's top DJs. In 2006, he ranked 73rd on DJ Mag's Top 100 DJ list. In 2005, he ranked 82nd, up from 92 in 2004. Additional rankings were 83rd in 2003 and 76 in 2001. More recently, in DJ Times, BT was ranked as America's second best DJ, as voted by fans.

BT has said of his musical background, "I'm not the traditional type of dance music artist. I'm not a DJ. I come from a classical music background. I attended the Berklee College of Music, and I played in punk bands."

www.btmusic.com