Music has been and continues to be the most important part of my life. Musical artists such as Sting, Depeche Mode and Jaco Pastorius have had a huge influence on my personality and temperament, and their music has inspired me to philosophise about my dreams and ideals. Music is also my favourite form of creative expression, having taken guitar lessons when I was nine and eventually graduating to the electric bass in my high school’s jazz band.
If you want to discover new music, one of the best ways is to ask cool people like me what we listen to! I’ve amassed a modest collection of CDs over the years, and I’ve compiled a list of my favourite artists and albums to share with the rest of the world.
When I was a lot younger, I formed a band with a couple of my friends and we would get together to play Beatles tunes as well as some of our own songs. We even went as far as going to a recording studio to record a song we wrote and it was a great experience. We dreamed of owning a 4-track magnetic tape recorder like a TEAC or something, so we could record ourselves whenever we wanted, but we were kids and those kinds of tools were beyond our means.
Having never lost the desire to write my own music, I began building a digital recording studio in 1998 with the purchase of an Alesis QS6 series synthesizer, Steinberg’s Cubase software, and various audio equipment like a microphone and a mixer. My venerable Beige G3 Power Macintosh is the hub that connects all these components together, sending MIDI data out to the synthesizer which emulates a wide range of musical instruments, then playing through my Peavey amplifier which goes back into my Mac as audio. While I haven’t gotten too far in creating any chart-busting songs, it’s fun trying and I hope to put more effort into it one of these days.
Studio Setup: An illustration of how I have setup my digital recording studio.
