I think Pro Tools is pretty analogous to how people composed music on tape back in the 70s, taking little fragments of things and saying, 'How can we organize these in a sensible way'?

I'm a real big electronic music nut; when I was young I listened to musique concrète, German music from Cologne in the early 50s, all kinds of stuff.

People have a hard time going to a club and seeing this business tool on stage that's wholly indicative of everything that rock is not. Rock is not about sitting in an office setting up documents, yet they see someone on stage doing that.

I use a laptop more as a tool, as sort of the central artery. Everything goes through the digital audio card of my computer, but if I had my druthers I'd do everything in dedicated hardware.

With the mailorder, I wake up in the morning, I check my e-mail, process the orders, and then I just print everything out. And then for the rest of the day it's actually sitting with paper.

I build the individual modules to meet a demand. If I need the music to change direction, I want to have the tools to be able to do that.

Records can ruin you. That's why it's important to be as intimately familiar as possible with the history of recorded music, I guess. In a way, it's an argument for record collecting.