EIGHTIES

I collect musical instruments.  Okay, maybe "hoard" is a better word.  They just fascinate me.  Music is such a curious thing.  It's a language with no obvious practical purpose, but one that so many people learn to understand, even if they never speak it.  And instruments are where physics, engineering, and human expression all come together to make it happen.  Growing up I learned to fix instruments since new ones were too expensive.  Along the way, though, I developed a love for old, loved, abused, anachronistic, out of the ordinary instruments.  Someone had them before me.  What music was played on them?  What music is left in them?  How did people make tools for musical expression before computers?  Before transistors?  Before electricity?  I've got a timeline of instruments from the past hundred years that answer those questions.

Anyway, I end up bringing home strays more often than I probably should.  A month ago I got an old, broken Korg DW-6000 synthesizer from someone for $5.  It looks like a cheap toy keyboard, but it's got golden guts.  An hour a another $5 for parts were enough to bring it back to life.  I had thought that I'd fix it up and sell it quickly to get money for a microphone or some other equipment, but now that I've played it I think it may have to stick around in my musical instrument retirement home.  Here's a recording with all of the parts played on the DW-6000 (except for some percussion on a box drum):