Not long ago I added Cubase Studio 5 and Native Instruments Komplete 7 to my arsenal. I am more than complete, I have musical tooling oozing out the wazoo. Now I need to invest TIME. I paid for these tools with my job, but now that I have them, I quit my job so I can start using them! Yeah, I quit my job! I was making a nice income at a big-name company you (whoever you are) have probably heard of. And naw, making music wasn't my reason for quitting, it was *a* reason, though, a really minor one in my list of many reasons. I also recently bought a ukelele. I kind of like how it is used in the intros and first-verses of some great pop-rock songs so I figured I should have it. Plus it's a super handy little instrument that can be taken anywhere, being like 1/10th the size of a guitar and all. (OK maybe not quite that small. But mine's a soprano uke, it's tiny!) The Phoenix, Arizona metro has some events worth checking out to expand the right-brain IQ, I've RSVP'd. Among them are TEDx events, which offer up both unique musical talents as well as fascinating monologues from the world-changing leadership leagues. Another one is "open mic night" with a group called Infuse. They meet every other month or so and do music and poetry. I recently saw some YouTube videos featuring open mic at Infuse, it's very inspiring and in quite a few cases (about half) very impressive talent-wise. So now that I'm freed up from my job, .. well, I have to go look for another job soon. But I'm definitely going to take a bunch of the time off to dabble in music further, i.e. to learn how to use my new tools and how to play my uke. :) Meanwhile I still have guitars that I need to keep skilling up with. It's all fun and fulfilling, isn't it? Having musical instruments and production tools; I don't dream of profiting from it all but now and then I imagine what it would be like if I made a career out of it ... wow, just wow. So fun and fulfilling. To those of you who are making a career out of music production .. well, none of you are reading this, I'm sure, but if you were, I would really like to shake your hand. If you're in Scottsdale, Arizona, ping me! I frequent Coffee Plantation (a local rather large and 'spensive coffee shop) and I'm there right now where I'm writing this blog entry. Maybe we can chat about music production. I might like to do some live music performances here someday, if only my live musical performance skills weren't so weak......