How I came to be stuck in audio mixdown limbo – Part 1

I am a creative/artistic type person. One of the ways that I express that creativity is by playing and composing music, and I have been doing that, not exclusively but pretty consistently, for over 20 years. I started with interminable shuffle-blues jams in High School, progressed rapidly to non-remuniterive attempts to busk in the Paris Metro and quickly graduated to banging out prospective jingles for coffee beans and public transportation on an out-of-tune grand piano in my college fraternity house.

As you can see from my GAS list, musical equipment costs money, and as a young man on my own in the world I didn’t have any. My priorities were paying the rent and getting laid, and the only work I could get (as a temporary office assistant) really didn’t cover much more than the essentials outlined above. There was a period of time where I focused on attaining a slightly more elevated career path than “that kid in the typing pool”, so most of my time (and the little money I had) went to education and training and working long hours at apprentice rates. But by the mid ‘90’s I was making a good salary (essential 1) and married (essential 2), so I started spending a little more time with music.

I had a bunch of songs that I would play at my local coffeehouse on solo acoustic guitar, and a (small) group of accommodating friends who would come down to hear me play, but I wasn’t really happy with what I was playing. The songs were OK, but there were things about the songs that I was just not able to convey on solo acoustic guitar. So I got an electric guitar, a distortion pedal, and a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder.