The year is 1990, and I have $0.00

I had just joined the US Air Force, and I was getting paid $450 every two weeks. This was a ton of money to someone who had never had any, so I was happy. I would eagerly devour Keyboard Magazine and Electronic Musician when they came out every month, and I had quite a collection of back issues (5 or 6) to read and re-read. Once through Basic Military Training School, I was transferred off to Keesler AFB, Mississippi for Technical Training School. Luckily, I was roomed with another fanatic want-to-be-musician: Airman Schuyler. Only he had his heart set on a Fender Stratocaster. 

One weekend after our checks came in the mail slot, we hustled to the local music store, up the road from Keesler. Coincidentally passing a pawn shop, which held guitars and keyboards, I remember there was a Casio CZ-101 there, but it was $400 and only retailed for $450. Why would anyone want a Casio? When we finally got to the music store, Schuyler had been eyeballing a new 1990 Fender Strat, and I a Roland D-5 synthesizer. Both were about equally priced at $800, and we simultaneously decided to put $400 on our chosen axes to place them on layaway. For this, they gave me the manuals for the D-5. I would read up on what I had purchased. It was the only synth in the shop I could afford, and frankly I wasn't going to be outdone by my equally broke roommate. We didn't eat much over the next two weeks (the free chow hall probably saved our lives), but we each greeted the mailman next payday and hurried back to the music store to payoff our respective treasures. We hurried home for a busy weekend of trying to outdo the other. 

I had no chops, no playing skills, and a pair of shitty Koss headphones to hear my D-5. I learned that it was 8 part polyphonic (didn't know what that meant) and it had drum sounds, but no effects or sequencer. How was I supposed to make it play the songs I heard in my head? Even the cheap Casio I had contained a little drum machine and metronome. Oh well, I would conquer this somehow. 

I soon learned that I needed a sequencer. So next paycheck, I headed back to the music store. So did Schuyler, because he needed a drum machine. I left the store with a Yamaha QY10, and he with an Alesis SR16, again our entire paychecks. 

Lucky for me, the QY10 was an 8-part multi-channel sequencer, perfectly fit with the D-5. Finally, I could program the sequencer to play back tracks and even had enough polyphony to play over those parts. I could make whole songs with 8 parts! What more could a person possibly need? 

Well, storage for one. After about a month, I filled up the QY10's memory with 10 songs. So back to the music store, where I purchased a floppy disk drive to unload the memory of the QY10. Once you dumped the songs via multi-channel MIDI into the disk drive, you could play them back from floppy. I was in heaven! Schuyler too, but he soon realized he needed a 4 track cassette recorder. He opted for the Fostex. 

But in a couple months, I outgrew my setup. There were only 256 sounds in the D-5 and a limited amount of synthesis techniques to change them up. It was barely even stereo, as most sounds were 12-bit and mono. So I continually read magazines and articles to figure out what the pro's did. I would go that route. 

1991: Once I arrived at my permanent base in Dover Delaware, I was introduced to someone who had done this already: Seth Carrington! He had been in my exact shoes, but 10 years prior, and he had lots of synths (4 at the time) and a mixer and recording gear. Together we decided that I needed the ultimate machine: a sampler! With this, I could have any sound I could record! Even other synths or drums or vocals or anything. So he gracefully sold me his Roland S-50, a wonderful 12-bit digital sampler. But that introduced a new problem: how to hear both synths without a mixer? Answer: two identical headphones, one on each ear!

Eventually that solution sucked, so I bought a Mackie 1202 mixer. This changed my life. I could hear anything with a single pair of headphones, run things from mixer to sampler, and do things that were impossible at the time. Eventually, I upgraded to an Alesis Datadisk for "permanent" storage. 

Then I got the bug: pawn shops and used analog synths. Almost simultaneously, I found a Korg Polysix and Roland SH-101 in pawnshops and brought them home. They were incredibly useful for making music and learning synthesis. They also had different sound capabilities and features. Soon, I needed to record, so I picked up a cassette recorder. This was fun, but the sound quality lacked. So a friend gave me her reel to reel recorder. It had much better specs and quality and looked really great. I made tons of recordings on it, which I would bounce down to cassette for playback in the car. 

Pawn shops led to more pawn shops. Soon, I was spending weekends in Washington DC or Philly or the surrounding New Jersey area. Here I learned there was a classified newspaper called Tradin Times. I learned that it came out on Thursday mornings, so I would race to a local WaWa to pick one up every Thursday. I found amazing deals, mostly for analog synths no one wanted. Soon, I had 10. Then 20. Then more. I quickly learned that by selling something in the TT, people would call you with trades or other synths, so I would advertise weekly selling something. This worked. Through this, I acquired Juno's, more 101's, Oberheims, Sequential's, miscellaneous Rolands, Korgs, etc.  

Eventually, I hit my first jackpot: someone wanted to trade me a Minimoog, Taurus pedals, and a DX7 for a Korg M1. Hell yeah, and how soon can I meet you? 

The Minimoog was broken (but the filter worked of course!) so I found a guy to fix it in exchange for the Taurus pedals (also not working) who set me up with a Minimoog buyer for $1000, which I did same day-- I picked up the now working Minimoog and drove it 50 miles to the buyers without even hearing it, taking my $1000. While I thought getting better synths was the goal, it was actually meeting people who had even better deals to make me. Live and learn!

I got married and came into possession of an IBM PC that I could put a MIDI card in, so I went with the only solution that had any advertising whatsoever: Cakewalk for DOS. Now I could sequence forever!

This continued for months until one day Keyboard magazine had an ad for a new Kurzweil keyboard: the K2000