By day, I'm a mild mannered computer programmer. By night, I transform (with XSLT even) into a music lover of great proportions! Whether it's spending a long weekend at the Strawberry Music Festival, dancing to the funky jazz of the Living Daylights, creating mixes for Radio Free Ashland, or just strumming on one of my guitars, music holds a special place in my life. I consider music to be the language of emotion. Music is multi-cultural, trancends the spoken word, and a function of all species. Perhaps it was the scene in "Close Encounters of a Third Kind" or perhaps it was the performance art of John Cage, but somehow music has significant influence in my life.
In the last three years I have transcended being an audience member and gotten involved in several aspects of live performance. For a brief period, my band "Rubber Band" rocked the town. Then the techie in me got hold of a pile of sound gear, leading me to engineer over a hundred live gigs. And that led to a DAW where I could edit, mix and experiment with production. Perhaps the pinnacle achievement of all this were the live cybercasts I engineered for Radio Free Ashland's Alive In Ashland archive. Some of those gigs are close mic'ed, mixed live and recorded straight to hard disk or DAT all while simulcasting to the audio server. 6 hands, lots of wires and late nights loading it all in the car.
Copyright 2009 John Fricker
