Who?

I am a lifelong composer and began recording on a 4-track cassette recorder with a somewhat primitive Korg 8-bit drum machine and a Tom Scholz Rockman. I would mix with a send/return through an old reverb pedal. It sounded terrible and I knew it. Over time, I became completely obsessed with the entire production cycle and spent more time and money than is arguably practical on improving my equipment and skills in search of a way to create reasonable quality manifestations of my original work.

I had the wondrous fortune to attend university working through three consecutive degrees in music composition. The last of these was a D.M.A. specializing in computer music and contemporary theory. It was the time of Digi-Design Pro Tools, CSound, early Max, and Cool Edit. It was the transition from process-bound digital music to real-time. It was incredibly fun and incredibly tedious. I could not have imagined the hardware and software we would have thirty years later. But I’m sure glad we do. Today’s technology offers freedom to anyone who wants to travel a liminal path.

By total coincidence, I finished school in 1997 which was the very beginning of mass dotcom hysteria. I took a hiatus from composition and stuck my toe in the world wide web. It consumed me for nearly 25 years. Starting as a programmer, I volunteered for anything and everything. There were no answers to look up. They had to be invented. Applications crashed with every breath they took. Traffic increased. They crashed again. But eventually, the world wide web of chaos attracted enough interest that quality tools, both hardware and software, began to emerge. The Internet Era had begun, the dotcom bubble blew up and popped, 911 changed the world as we knew it, and Adobe bought Cool Edit. I settled in to corporate life destined to become another executive in a long line of executives who spent all their time fighting the status quo with just enough success to outpace the other executives desperately trying to hold on to the status quo for dear life.

Ya know what? Fuck that! I quit.

There is a moment that I hope everyone has in their life. A moment of true clarity. A moment of freedom that, in my case, brought me back to the dream I started as a kid listening to the radio who got his first Les Paul knockoff for $75 dollars (later nicknamed “The Whatever”). That teenager with a mono reverb pedal and ¼ inch tape trying to achieve the recording quality of Talk Talk and Rush. That graduate student who sat in front of a NeXT workstation rendering code into audio for 5 hours only to make a few changes and do it again. That newly minted adult who wanted to create things nobody had heard before. To be my own kind of unique.

Ya know what else? … It’s never too late.