Born as Lawrence Roger Fast in Livingston, New Jersey on 10 December 1951, Larry Fast attended Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, where he obtained a degree in History. There he took his previous training in piano and violin and melded them with computer science to become interested in synthesized music and to build his own primitive sound-making electronic devices.

He was introduced to Rick Wakeman, the keyboard player from the band Yes, during a local radio interview, and traveled to the UK to work with Yes on their 1974 album ‘Tales from Topographic Oceans’. He got a recording contract with Passport Records and started releasing synthesizer music albums under the project name Synergy. Between 1975 and 1987, Synergy released nine albums, including the soundtrack for the film ‘The Jupiter Menace’.

Meanwhile, Fast also played on tracks by a number of popular music acts, including Peter Gabriel, Foreigner, Nektar, and Hall and Oates. For Kate Bush, he played the Prophet 5 synthesizer on the song Breathing.

Fast has done some work with designing listening devices for the hearing disabled; his wife had been working in the field for some time. Fast owns several patents for audio distribution using infrared optical technologies. Fast is also part of a government group aiming to protect some of New Jersey’s historic assets against developers.