The Music Never Stopped

If I were to cite the things that form the man I am today, music would be right near the top of the list along with cats and nature. As soon as I heard music as a kid I wanted to be able to create it myself. I always loved the music my parents listened to and that gave me a fantastic foundation on which to build.

I took piano lessons as a child up until the age of 16 or so. I certainly didn’t find it easy throughout all my tutoring. It was a painful process and hard for me since I was a very anxious student. This anxiety did me no favors and hindered my progress throughout all my formative years and beyond, to be brutally honest.

What I did learn was basic music theory and where the notes were on the piano. I was drawn more to the sounds I could make rather than struggling to read music and play in the more traditional sense. I wanted to create music that was unique to me and musically this is what I have done ever since.

Throughout my life I had built up quite a collection of beautiful instruments. I always had am acoustic guitar within reach. I bought my first electric guitar when I was 18 or 19, I don’t remember exactly, and this opened up the doors to creativity on a level I had only ever dreamed of.

I was drawn to the electric guitar for on reason in particular. I loved rock music but what I loved most were the guitar solos within the songs. I was soon discovered musicians that were solo instrumentalists, the likes of Steve Vai and Joe Satriani. These two artists pushed the boundaries of electric guitar and inspired me to keep creating. 

I remember learning, or trying to learn “Always with Me, Always with You” by Joe Satriani. I had it on cassette and would set A-B on loop to try and catch the notes. It took me a while and I managed a good deal of it. I realized that like these phenomenal musicians, I wanted to write music unique to me. 

My Recording Studio

In the early days of my experimentation in recording guitar at home, I would connect my guitar and zoom effects directly into my stereo and record directly onto cassettes. I had so many recordings of strange sounds. There seemed to be to end to the crazy sound I could make using this tiny zoom effects gadget. This was the shape of things to come. I would crank up the delay and the reverb until I was in an ocean of sound with no particular direction in mind. I was wallowing in an ambient sea with no beginning and no end.

This was a time of great discovery for me. It was one thing making this music but to actually be able to record it was a game changer. During this time, just before the advent of home computers, it was all cassettes and auxiliary cables but I managed to make it work. I had quite a library of home recordings.

After a year or to we move to a larger house and we bought our first home computer. I primarily used it for photo editing but after a while I started to investigate how I could record music to the computer. As time has gone by from the early days of digital work stations to the tech we have today, I have been up to date every step of the way. From plugging to the mic input on the back my first computer to firewire of my first audio interface. The journey has been one of constant learning and constant improvement.

Being someone who like to keep stuff, I wanted to digitalize all of my analogue recordings to future proof them should the technology for playing cassettes should become obsolete. I hooked up my yellow Sony walkman to the computer and found a way to transfer the audio to my hard drive. I have a folder called “My Vibes”. This was always backed up and I felt good that I had finally digitalized it. 

The last iteration of my recording studio prior to October 7th 2023 was state of the art. Our house was planned to have an open studio upstairs where my music studio and my wife’s sewing studio would be. We had five good productive years in our respective creative spaces.

The total destruction of all that we had, meant that there was nothing to salvage. I had no off-site backups of my music and photography. I did, however, keep many finished recordings on my Google Drive account so not all was lost. Losing project files was particularly painful. I would frequently load a project into Cubase, mute the solo track and play along to my own backing track. This was my way of practicing guitar and a way to forget the issues of the day. My studio was my refuge, my place to be me.