garage

It's intellectually lazy to divide the world into two types of people, but when it comes to using computers to create music, it seems to be true.

The first group are what I'd call digital music enthusiasts. They compose almost exclusively at a computer, using a MIDI controller and/or sounds from a wide variety of third-party digital sources--loops from a program like ACID, beats and virtual synthesizers from a program like Reason, short samples that they recorded themselves or spliced from another source.

I'm a member of the second group, the reluctant analog dinosaurs. We came … Read more

Last night, I started a professional audio production program at the University of Washington Extension. There are about 40 students in the class. A half dozen or so are like me--in our 30s or older, with full-time careers outside the music industry, but with a longtime interest in recording and a lot of experience writing and playing music.

But most are full-time students, or between college and graduate school, and are expecting to make a career in the music industry. Some of these kids are frighteningly single-minded--there's an 18-year-old who's been messing around with recording software since he … Read more

So you just picked up a new Enzo at the friendly neighborhood Ferrari dealer and are bringing it home for the first time. As the garage door rises, it hits you: How can you possibly park a world-class sportscar here with all this mess?

If you're like many American homeowners and suffer from Ugly Garage Syndrome, this may well be of interest--with or without a multimillion-dollar car collection. An Arizona-based outfit called GarageMahals will design and construct a luxury garage to your custom specifications for prices ranging from $50 to $125 per square foot, offering such amenities as steel … Read more

The information age just got a little older, as the "birthplace of Silicon Valley" has been formally listed on the National Register of Historic Places. More specifically, this is 367 Addison Ave. in Palo Alto, California: the garage where, in 1938, two guys named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started a company that became known as Hewlett-Packard the next year.

The new historic status is official as of Thursday. (You think it's been Zillowed?)

The house had been built circa 1905 and apparently once housed Palo Alto's first mayor; the garage, however, wasn't built until … Read more