Finished off another financial quarter. Higher sales than any previous quarter. Have to temper this against the reality of slimmer margins than any previous quarter so there's not much change on the bottom line. But I took a real paycheck home. Just hope I don't have to give it back to pay for some of the Xmas merchandise I ordered. Sigh.

Picked up a guitar. A classical. Hmmm. What to play.

Slow down, you move too fast.
You got to make the morning last.
Just kicking down the cobble stones.
Looking for fun and feelin' groovy.

I've been shopping the web for some new recording studio hardware. Why can't I just buy them directly? I run a music store after all. Because all the good stuff is distributed by the brand name cartels. The annual product commitment is more than I could sell in five years.

But I digress. There's finally some stuff out there which almost does what I need in a home studio. Almost. The all-in-one keyboard with builtin PC and audio cards was an almost contender. Way too pricey for what's in it. And the dealership agreement runs 32 pages of terse legalese of all the things I have to do in order to stay in compliance and keep the dealership. The killer is the commitment to buy about $25k in merchandise before I can even be considered for a franchise. And I must take a week of training in Texas at my expense. No thank you.

The latest and greatest thing is called a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) which usually combines about 8 input channels with a computer controlled mixer. You can get additional sound cards to get more inputs. But the problem is, there's no concept of an expandable internal audio bus on a PC. So you can only route inputs and outputs to the same cards. You can't go back and forth between them and a DAW without lots of patch cables. The whole reason for having lots of channels is so you don't need to keep swapping patch cables around. They can't really give you 16 or more channels on the DAW because most computers can't record fast enough to handle more than about 8. One of the new devices adds a bunch of digital audio inputs. But to use them one needs yet another box to get to them from the analog world. It runs about $1000. The DAW is about $1200. The software is another $700 or so. The firewire interface is $50-$100. A computer with hard drives fast enough to do 16 tracks is another two grand. It all adds up quickly. And I still don't have half the functionality as my old 32 track mixer and tape unit. Ouch. So I'm still shopping.

Back to those keyboards for a minute. It's been one of my biggest dilemnas at the store - how to buy non-cartel keyboards. The only thing out there in the global free markets are cheap little Casios. Toys. The big brands aren't worth stocking. They only have a six-month shelf life before they're obsolete. But I wouldn't have brought this up if I hadn't found a solution. A computer in a keyboard? Why bother? Your home PC can be a full-fledged sampling synthesizer with thousands of preset voices and drum kits. All one really needs is an input device. A MIDI controller. They're cheap and they're on the global market. So I'll just buy a bunch of those and screw the big brands. Use any software you want, from free to pro quality. The keyboard itself isn't going to become obsolete. It's just a long box with keys and a MIDI cable. That's it. Full-fledged keyboard workstations are just sucker traps. If you can't crack the market, go around it.