The last big technological advancement of the 90’s was the addition of a Compact Disc Burner to my computer. These old technology posts really make me laugh to myself. They all seem so common today but back in 1999 it was new and a big deal. That image reminded me that blank CD’s used to be sold individually or in packs of 5 or 10. Now I buy spindles of 100 for pennies each. How times change.
Now part of me missed the cassette making process. It really was an art form. It was also a time consuming process. Now my multimedia mixing system allowed me to make a 110 minute tape in real time which was a big improvement over the stop and start method before the mixing board.
My CD burner in conjunction with Windows Media Player sped the process up but it took a great deal of the art out of it. With my mixing board, multiple input devices and cassettes, I could layer a bunch of things together and crossfade tracks so that there was never dead air space unless I wanted it that way. With the CD burner, it was just tracks butted up against each other. The big advantage was that it only took 5 minutes to create a 70 minute CD as opposed to 112 minutes to make a 110 minute cassette.
The other cool thing about burning CD’s was the random shuffle aspect. I made anAuto-Playlistthat would select at random songs from my library, limit the duration to 70 minutes [those early CD’s would only hold 70 minutes]. So I could burn a dozen CD’s for a road trip and have no idea what was on them.
In October of 1999, I reluctantly accepted an invitation to join my friends Scott and Aric on a long weekend of fishing on a little lake up near Cadillac, Michigan. I wasn’t a fisherman or remotely interested in fishing but I figured it would be good to hang out with those guys again. After The Roach Days, we really didn’t see each other very much. Aric and I each got married and who knows what Scott was up to. If you remember back to The Roach Days posts, Aric, Scott and I musically came from different backgrounds, we shared The Metal Years together and after, we branched out into different musical directions. Aric got into Stevie Ray Vaughan and some country stuff like The Dixie Chicks. Scott went into the crusty old Delta blues. He was listening to Buddy Guy, B.B. King and Albert Collins type stuff. As you know, I went toward the New Age and electronic stuff which would eventually lead me to Techno and Dubstep.
I burned a coupleNew Agesampler CDs and brought them fishing. It was the start of a trend that continues today. We meet a couple times a year to fish and hang out. Part of that process is to sample each others musical evolutions. Of course, personal media players have taken over from the CD era but we’ll go out on the boat for a few hours, fish and listen to music and discuss. It was a sunny and calm afternoon. The sky was deep blue and the trees surrounding the lake were brilliant with fall color. I played Disc 1 of my New Age mixes. It seemed to go along perfectly with the pace of the day. The soothing electronic pulses and guitars carried our minds away as we glided silently over the glass like surface of the lake. I ended up giving the CD’s to Aric because he really seemed to enjoy them. It was an amazing day and the first of many music filled fishing weekends.