1992-2004

By 1992 I was the VP of Finance at my electronics firm and really enjoying life. (I've been there are all my life since, and I'm still there today some 30 plus years later). 

It was during this period of time that I began to write lots of music. Lot's of it was rubbish and some things were ok. But it started with the advent of the Macintosh Ci I purchased, along with Studio Vision Pro and an audio card from digidesign that allowed for 4 tracks of audio recording along with the midi stuff. I loved the technology these things represented and I started to consume every bit of information and knowledge about music production. I read every book and magazine I could get my hands on...

The overwhelming attraction of all of this was the ability for me to work alone. Put another way, I didn't 
have to rely on anyone or anything else to start to realize my musical ideas. Before I knew what was happening, I owned every midi sound module worth owning. I had hard drives filled with sounds and samplers filled with inspiration.  It was all tied together by 5 or 6 Opcode Studio 5 interfaces that allowed me to put up massive sequences and experiment with different combinations in real time. 

Sure, the sound of a midi sequence is artificial at best, but you just kept working it, replacing parts with better sounding parts... mixing cleverly... keep working. There were many moments that I thought my stuff was inferior and I should just quit and go ride my bike. But then I'd hear something on the radio that would make me scratch my head. Bad music on the radio saved on many occasions. 

I had several guitars and basses and was really living large. In 1993 I bought a Yamaha G3 piano and thoroughly enjoyed playing it. I bought a few nice microphones and preamps and started singing my tunes into the Studio Vision.  At some point, Studio Vision and Opcode went belly-up. I was forced to switch to Emagic's Logic, which was much more powerful but complicated as f.  Apple later acquired Logic and tamed it some, making it somewhat easier to work with. I eventually switched to Pro Tools in 2008, more details later...

I settled into a rather normal, quiet and blissful lifestyle, holding down my duties at the company,  learning about aviation and electronics, studying music, writing and recording my stuff... Meanwhile, my childhood bride founded her Graphic Design Company, and now the house was filled with Apple Computers churning away on graphic and sound. I became quite proficient at Photoshop and the other Adobe products. It was a period of discovery that gave me the mystical feeling that this was what our maker initially intended for us to do, to come to this dimension and have fun discovering what it was all about. 

One day in 2004, I was diagnosed with Stage 4 Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.