What’s different now from when you first got started?

What isn’t different? Everything’s different. First of all, today there’s not as much in common with live people as there was when I got started. You had to make sure that everything was ready to go so that when you played some notes they were going to be the notes that people heard. Today, you can go back and fix everything and even if you don’t fix it they can go back and fix it in the studio. So you wonder today what’s true anymore because so much can be altered. Pictures can be altered and certainly music can be altered, so everything sounds perfect even though it may not be when it was first performed. That’s a big thing that I would say is different. Of course you have all the electronics, you have the computers today. When I first started to learn to write I used a pencil and paper. Today I’m getting kind of spoiled by using the synthesizer. I’m getting very spoiled in fact.

I still maintain that the best music comes from a pencil but it’s kind of hard to push the synthesizer away because it makes life so easy when you can hear what it is that you’re writing, immediately hear it. I never had the ears to really hear what it is I wanted to hear. So with the computer if you write something you hear it played back right away so you can say, oh I don’t want that and change a note or, oh this can make it nice and add this. So you get kind of spoiled. And the other day I had my 5 year old granddaughter here and I said, let’s write a tune for your mother. So we were writing it for violin and piano so she got at the keyboard and she started poking out notes and I said, just play with one finger now and I’ll make up the rhythms and you make one finger notes and just play something. So I put in quarter notes and eighth notes and sixteenth notes and man the tune that came out… (Laughs) My daughter is going to perform it at the concert as a little encore because it really ended up being a cute little kiddy tune but it sounds great. It shows what the possibilities are with these machines.