I began my musical studies at about 12 years of age
I was fascinated with sound and audio engineering
I grew up with lots of young rock band members as friends and acquaintances, so that my studies went in the direction of electronics and acoustics, with my main interest being in building gigantic power amps to drive all of those speakers in your local stadium
gigantic sound was my goal
I had never really given much thought to learning to play and instrument, but really like to play with the autoharp
I took mine all apart and turned it into a zither-like instrument which I took great pleasure at playing with while going to sleep at night
from there I managed to get ahold of a transverse flute and began to learn to blow on that instrument
finally, somehow or other, I began the study of spanish and classical guitar at the age of 15
I worked diligently, long hours into the night, to learn harmonic theory and counterpoint
I learned to sight read music in the treble clef
During those years I met a piano tuner who was also a very good showman and player who taught me the secret art of piano tuning
That was my introduction to the world of keyboards and keyboard music
At the age of 20, after sight reading guitar music for 5 years,
I began to bang out chords on the piano
It was liberating to be able to play much that I was unable to figure out how to play on the guitar fingerboard
I learned to read the bass clef, and began to learn how to use my left hand for bass, while coordinating it with my right hand
As time went on a musician friend of mine who transcribed really fast fiddle tunes for a living introduced me to Cakewalk
I had never seen a sequencer before
He was using it to assist him in writing out the music which he had been transcribing without use of a keyboard
but because he was a keyboardist it was only natural for him to begin to figure out the various fiddle tunes on the keybord, which then wrote out the notes nice and neatly
one day I went to a private party at my friend's house
as he entertained guests and family there was a keyboard playing itself which he used for background musci during the party
everyone could recognize that it was him who was playing, although, we wasn't
I was hooked and wanted to know everything that there is to know about these matters
I bought a Roland Juno 106 by cashing in a life insurance policy, and put together my first sound computer, with the greatest of difficulty
Plug and play had not yet been invented, and one had to figure out how to steal one of only 16 interrupt requests in order to have a line to run the music through
it was crazy as can be
after a number of years, I began to experiment with multi-keyboard setups
I maxed out at 4 keyboards, and was thinking, all of the time, about how to get more than 4 going all at once