Software is eating the World
I started playing bass guitar when I was in high school. The whole goal was to make our own music and get ‘chicks.’ I won’t lie, I was a horny teenager. Over the course of the years and through college, I played in heavy metal, punk, and improv music bands. I loved every minute of it. We recorded, played live gigs in New York City - even played at CBGB’s twice - and built up a small DIY following. I was lucky to have a great group of friends that ‘jam’ with and live these adventures.
When I moved back New Jersey, I hooked up with my old bandmates and started playing again. We’d hang out on Friday and the weekends playing music, drinking beer, and having a good time. I met my wife around that time and life took me into a different direction. I got married, bought a house, had kids, moved up in my career, switched careers, and moved to the Startup World. Needlessly to say, my life got very busy and my bass guitar just started to gather dust in the corner.
When my kids got older, they started to take piano lessons. After a few years they decided that piano was not for them and one moved to Drums and the other to Trombone. They both love music and find it fun to play and always ask me, “Hey Dad, why don’t you practice your music.” I always had an excuses, I’m looking at my bass right now as I write this post, and I wonder “Why did I ever stop playing?” I stopped playing over 15 years ago. How can that be?
Social Distancing
Since New Jersey ‘locked down’ for the Covid19 outbreak, I’ve been spending my mornings and any free time in the evenings taking some online courses and Master Classes. In the mornings I usually take a Go Language course on Udemy.com and in the evenings I started watching Music Production classes. I’m utterly floored by how powerful these software programs have gotten. Back when we recorded we had to go into a studio, lay down the tracks individually, have the Sound Engineer mix them, and pay a lot of money. Now I can just do everything through a computer and Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). I really don’t even need to know how to write music, I can just ‘draw’ lines that represent sounds in an editor field.
The fact that I could write the next hit song from a laptop, a DAW software, and my imagination is mind boggling. This is light years away from what I remember and now there’s NOTHING standing in the way of producing music. You can always make music but producing it was always a chore. I can now work with old bandmates from around the world and email music clips, put them into Logic Pro X or some other DAW and then continue to work from there.
Software is eating the world and it’s letting creative people express themselves to larger audiences every day.
There are no more excuses for me, except learning the software.