There were a few music-related acquisitions over the years, such as a 32-key MIDI controller for noodling around with a demo version of Reason, and an 88-key fully-weighted MIDI controller to try and get back on the piano-playing bandwagon, but nothing really stuck.

In November 2007, a few months before leaving my job to work on SuperMegaUltraGroovy full-time, I purchased an acoustic guitar. I don’t recall the specifics of what drove me to get one, but I knew I wanted to learn how to play. After I quit my job to pursue my indie software development dreams, I was able to spend my downtime practicing.

Several months into my new career, and after learning the basics via youtube/etc, I decided to upgrade my main acoustic guitar to something a little more substantial. About a week or so after that, I signed up for lessons to take my playing past the plateau I was stuck at.

So here I am, about 16 months, 7 months of lessons, 5 guitar purchases, 1 guitar return, and 1 guitar sale later, and I’m hopeful again about music in my life. I’m very passionate about this new hobby, and playing the guitar has helped me stay sane while working alone in my home.

Playing the guitar has also helped to fuel my application idea engine, just as building speakers did back in 2004. As a result, I’ve been working on something great since the holidays that stems from this new hobby. I can’t wait to release it, but I don’t want to reveal anything until I feel the product is ready.

So, stay tuned…

Often times I’d show up with a blank 1GB Jaz disk (remember those things?), and Nick (the main guy at the label) would send me away with a dry vocal track, and sometimes also a skeleton MIDI file that I could get the base chord progressions out of. The project would involve creating a remix of a song that I’d not heard before—because it didn’t really exist.

These projects were the most fun. I’d figure out a progression (if I didn’t already have one) that fit over the vocals, and build a song around it. The results were pretty good, and listening to some of these tracks today still brings a smile to my face.

In one instance, I actually got to work on-site at the studio on a remix. I was left alone with a room full of expensive equipment, complete with some awesome vintage synths, and a Mac running Cubase. I was given a half-done project on the Mac, and I was tasked to finish it off. It was a ton of fun, and the remix turned out great.

Shortly after that project, my thoughts had turned to post-secondary education. I was checking out the CS program at the University of Waterloo, and I wanted nothing more than to get into the program there. I studied hard for the Descartes math contest (used in conjunction with your high school grades to help your admission), worked on my programming skills, and generally didn’t have much time for music anymore.

Needless to say, my visits to the record label were less frequent. I think I had run a few of my own new tracks by Nick on two separate occasions, but he wasn’t overly interested. Frankly, neither was I at that point.

Once I started at the U of Waterloo, life had changed completely. I had no free time to play with my music setup, and communication with my group-members grew thin. Most extra-curricular activities were social in nature, and any other spare time would go into developing my coding skills.

After completing my first co-op job (at ATI, working on Windows NT/2K 2D graphics drivers), I wrote one last song in my dorm. Beyond this point, my Roland XP-50 simply accompanied me to and from school, and didn’t get a whole lot of play time. I managed to dig it out once again for use with a music theory course I took in my second year, but I only used it as a piano to practice intervals with.

My music career officially ended with the sale of my Roland XP-50 in my third year of school. I had just moved into my new condo, and Be informed me that my contract wasn’t going to be renewed after the sale to Palm. I needed some cash, and I hadn’t really pulled my keyboard out in months. So I eBayed it, found a job shortly thereafter, and went on with my life.

(Stay tuned for the epilogue…)

I watch a lot of TV shows with my wife. Recently, we’re starting to get into Weeds, and I couldn’t help but notice that I tend to think about the wrong things while watching some of these shows.

When a new character is introduced to the plot, I can’t help but wonder if this person will die off soon (action flick), get dumped (comedy), die off soon (drama), or simply survive until the end of the day (24). Instead, normal people likely just sit back and enjoy the story.

I have a knack for recognizing people from movies or other TV shows. “Hey, that’s the guy who played the UPS guy in Legally Blonde,” I said, as the main character in Weeds encounters her son in a Porsche with his girlfriend’s dad. I’m probably very annoying to watch movies/TV with because of that, but you can rest assured that I never go to theaters, so you’re safe. ;)

Anyway, if the main character of a series enters a romantic relationship, I can often tell with great certainty whether the relationship will last for a while because of how recognizable the other character is.

If the actor is cameo material (highly famous from another TV show, or worse, movies), you probably won’t see the actor for more than a few episodes. I’m left asking myself what kind of elaborate story they’ve dreamt up to eliminate this character. It’s somewhat distracting.

If the actor is recognizable as someone who normally plays filler characters in movies (see above UPS example), or a lead role on a very short-lived TV series or mediocre film, they have much more staying power. The probability is high that this character will come back repeatedly. For instance, I thought it was obvious that Kumar (Kal Penn) was going to stick around on House.

When the character is a complete unknown to me, I tend to get back to being a normal person again and simply enjoy the story. :)

This probably explains why I enjoy shows like CSI and Law & Order a little bit more, because the tendency is to have new actors show up and disappear in every episode.

Part of the sale included him trading me for a MIDI keyboard in addition to his cash. You see, I had been experimenting with music composition in MOD / S3M / XM tracking applications, and I felt much more comfortable putting together entire songs rather than simply playing a single instrument.

During my experimentation with the tracking scene, I managed to get involved with a Toronto-based tracking group called VSL (Variety is the Spice of Life). None of my tracks (as far as I can remember) ever made it out in their releases, and I grew frustrated with the tracking process. It involved hours of painstaking searches for samples, and I spent more time on the tools than the creation aspect.

So, my transition to MIDI, in addition to a Sound Blaster AWE32 (which included wave table synthesis—an incredible inclusion for such a low-cost card at the time), was the real birth of my music production career. There was still some sample-digging involved, but I managed to learn a lot more about the musical aspect (teaching myself a small bit about scales, chords, etc.) and experimented with various combinations of drums, keyboards, guitars, string sections, etc.

My tendency was to create electronic / dance music, because that’s what I was really into at the time. Because of this, the General Midi set of 128 instruments just wasn’t up to the task. I started getting stuck again with digging for appropriate samples, and screwing with software to load my AWE32 up with custom sounds.

For my 16th birthday, I got a Roland XP-50 music workstation. It was big, heavy, expensive, and I loved it immensely. It had an on-board sequencer (which was great for experimenting), a dance music expansion card (with loads of great sounds), and on-board patch editing. You could create just about any custom sound with an excellent base of relevant samples.

At this point, the music really started to flow. I got a copy of Cubase shortly after, and was churning out fairly complete tracks on a biweekly basis. I had pushed a few other guys in the tracking group to also jump on the MIDI bandwagon (they were also using AWE32s at the time, and managed to do well with them), and we got together to make a demo CD. We sent that demo CD out to a few record companies in the area, just to see what the reaction would be.

A Toronto-area dance music label approached us and said they loved the demo. They thought the tracks were well-produced, and they’d love to have a chat with us. We spoke about our musical tastes, our influences, and how we each made the music ourselves.

Upon learning how basic our setups really were, they were very impressed with the end results. None of us could really sing, and our musical talent was centered mostly around instrumental house / trance / europop genres. If anything, we’d be best suited to simply providing help with remixes, or pitching song ideas that could be used by the label’s other groups. In the next installment, I’ll talk more about how our group grew apart, and how I continued to work with the label a little bit more.

My attendance at C4[2] also means that I will not be answering support emails as quickly as I normally do for the next few days. To get non-sales-related help with TapeDeck or FuzzMeasure, please try posting your question to Get Satisfaction so that other customers might be able to help (or, even better, you find the answer to your question already answered there!).