His parents enrolled him in classical piano lessons when he was five, and he continued in these until he chose to stop out of frustration at age twelve.
When Land graduated from Mills in 1987, he took a job as a digital technician at an audio signal processor manufacturer called Lexicon.
In April of that year, Land obtained a job at the fledgeling Lucasfilm Games (today known as LucasArts), a software company owned by Star Wars creator George Lucas.
Land became the first in-house audio programmer and musician at the company, which had mostly outsourced its sound production duties to third-party developer Realtime Associates in the previous few years.
The two designed the iMUSE system as an advanced MIDI sequencer, but over the years, it has come to be, as Land describes it, "a methodology" that allows game producers greater control over in-game music, transitions, etc.
During his teen-age years, Land consciously studied and emulated the styles of performers such as Yes, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix.
The music of the Monkey Island series is Caribbean in style, tunes performed on light woodwinds and marimbas.
[citation needed] Land's skills as a composer and arranger are no more evident than in his choice of timbre; bringing together European folk and classical instruments with Caribbean and Central American instruments, weaving a texture that combines steel-pans, accordions, and afro-Cuban percussion amongst others.
On one hand, heavily influenced by European nationalist music and nautical shanties and horn pipes, and on the other incorporating Caribbean and Brazilian styles.