When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father's guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.

My dad's sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal - his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.

I kind of liked the method of the seventies where they would throw a little bit of money at a hundred different groups - not millions of dollars per group, but, you know, a few thousand. Throw them in the studio, and if five of those groups came out with a hit record it would be money well spent.

In the last 17 years of his working life, my father was finally rewarded with having landed a great job as first, a maintenance engineer, and then a senior locksmith with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Every time I meet the CEO of a record label I tell them how they did it in the seventies because they want to know. I tell them, "Sign a hundred people! Throw it against the wall and see which ones stick!" And they frown and say, "Oh, we can't do that!" and they start mumbling about demographics and this and that.

Originally a record producer more or less hired a bunch of professionals to participate in a recording session, the performers and the technicians, and a music director was put in charge. That directly related to a film producer's job.

I love Logic Audio and have been using it for years. All my track outputs used to come up on my old board in the same order as in the old Mac G4 - 1 through 32, came up as 1 through 32, for instance.