If you’re anything like me, your passion for music is rooted in something other than money (you know, some other form of greed like sex, self-absorption, insatiable over-sharing,…)

And if you are anything like me then you must be awed and excited as you watch Moore’s law drive the vision closer and closer to a full blown, professional (enough) recording studio on desktop (or laptop!).

In the old days a few paychecks got you a decent guitar and a rank amateur recording device; good for capturing drunken ramblings that later became anthemic turgid tomes when brought into the “real” studio. We are now officially at the place where a few paychecks brings you very close (close enough) to professional recording capabilities. Just a few more thousand bucks, spent judiciously at a good mastering house and no one would ever know you album was recorded on a machine that doubles as a porn dispenser check-book reconciler.

I had spent the first half of my life trying to write songs like the Beatles and play like Jimi. (I certainly would have settled for songs that sound like Jimi and playing like the Beatles. That would have been OK for me.)

Like millions of others I spent a few paychecks on a Fostex 4-track cassette recorder.

A few decades later I rigged a PC with Voyetra’s Sequencer Gold (later Cakewalk 2.0 for DOS) up to a couple of dime-store synths and the Fostex and wondered why on earth my tapes didn’t sound like Abbey Road meets Electric Ladyland.

In late 1998 I was on my eternal quest to find “realistic” drum sounds and a decent replacement for Cakewalk — the bane of my existence. Spending upward of $10,000 for a sampler was out of reach. Besides, as a software engineer it bothered me that the technology behind a sampler, while specialized, was not earth shaking and that five figures for a box that watched for MIDI keystrokes and triggered tiny waves was too much. (Today you can get the Bismark BS-1 for $50US and several others for free.)

By then Chris Moulios had written and released ACID as published by Sonic Foundry. To say this software changed my life would not be overstating things. The goal of this tool was completely foreign to me. I was not thinking about beat-matching or pitch-shifting. It was obviously geared toward clubbers, DJs, technoids… a whole world unknown to me. Yet, the techniques of authoring (click, drag, cut, paste) seemed super-natural and would compel me to rethink what “music” meant to me. (After writing Vegas for Sonic Foundry Chris moved on to write plugins for Fruity Loops and is now rumored to be in Apple’s audio group.)

By late 1999 I had completely abandoned “traditional” recording sounds and techniques. I discovered a community of ACID “addicts” online and teamed up with a very talented group of people in a virtual online collaboration called The Blotter Bros to do original music and spun off on my own to do remixes/rearrangements. All of which lead to my own personal site where I could experiment and rove around the virtual turntable space. (I have recently switched from ACID to Fruity Loops/FL Studio as my main mixing/arranging surface.)

I recently participated in a remix “contest” that afforded me the honor of being included on the “Copy Me/Remix Me” CD compiled and distributed by the good folks at Creative Commons.