I am unable to play, due to an injured right ring finger, but I can still type, even though I am having to use only two fingers.

First of all I would like to address some matters as regards exactly what it is that is going on here at this site.

I am a lifelong student of electronics and electricity.

I have also been making sound recordings on a regular basis since I was about twelve years old.

I have always loved audio engineering and sound recording and reproduction.

It was only natural, therefore, for me to be attracted to such things as the underlying physics of the sound waves, how to control acoustical properties from this level, and above all else, how to have the biggest, baddest, and definitely the loudest power amps and speaker cases known to man.

(Of course this came to a sort of illogical conclusion when every rock concert would have a huge wall of massive Marshall stacks (amps), which was definiely loud, but how controllable really?)

I also got deep into piano tuning and to listening for very tiny perturbations between sound waves.

It made my ears highly attuned so that I can assure you that I hear even the tiniest fluctuations in voice levels, which will often be the only clue one is likely to have, as to what the true state of matters is.

All of these various loves came together, very early on, with the invention of the Moog synthesizer and the Theramin.

All of a sudden an entirely new and very different kind of music was possible, yet no one seemed to see the possibilities, except for a very small and pioneering group of die-hard computer enthusiasts gone wild in their computer labs.

I remember listening to a number of these early attempts to figure out how to creatively use this new musical instrument/device.

That was during the late 1960's and early 1970's.

To put this in some perspective, I graduated from high school in 1970.

Some of my first jobs were in electronics factories.

We were making the integrated circuit board for the first digital watches.

We also were making the first hand-held calculators.

We also made numerous different circuit boards for military aircraft.

This was the very start of the digital age.

It was the lowly calculator and the lowly digital watch that really set things in motion.

Since that time there has been continuous innovation and much hard work, until finally in 1990 the world wide web was instituted.

So, during this entire time the very finest circuit boards and processors and multitudes of processors linked and chained together in numerous variations were being used inside of the lowly synthesizer.

I think that very few people actually have any idea of just exactly what is "under the hood" of any high quality synthesizer.

So, the sound engineering continued to develop at the forefront of electronics and computer science.

But, alas, sound turned out to be far, far more complex in terms of computer code than anyone had ever dreamed of.

It didn't take long to get a so-called "flute" sound.

But that was it.

Making a realistic guitar sound or a convincing vocal was just simply so complex that it was impossible to synthesize with any degree of realism.

That still has not changed to this day.

So, because of these things, and as an outgrowth of them the lowly digital recording machine and sound "sampling" technology suddenly came of age.

For example, just because I cannot synthesize the sound of a guitar with the requisite degree of realism, what about if I simply made a digital recording of a guitar and built a keyboard with each note representing one recorded note from the actual instrument itself.

Now, finally, we are beginning to get somewhere.

Oh, oh, but here come those nasty facts of physics again.

For it seems that it takes a marvelously large amount of data.

So, for example, a modern piano has 88 keys.

The keys which are the least complex in terms of sound waves and patterns created by them will require at a minimum one gigabyte of data per note.

This will be our starting point.

That's a whole lot of gigabytes, and that is for one of the easier instruments to sample and to electronically emulate.

(to be continued)
10:40 a.m.