Letter to Julia 20121128

In the name of Allah, most Gracious, most Merciful.

Hi there, my beautiful young Julia.  How are you feeling today?  I'm suddenly tired for some reason, I had to take a nap before I could write this letter.  It's been raining everyday, so the weather is nice and cool.  I just finished the backup vocals for "Dragonfly", and am about to mix them down.  They're not perfect, but I could always computerize them, or if that fails, I'll just do them again.  But making music with a computer is much easier than it was 15 years ago, when all I had was a 4 track cassette recorder.  Oh, yuck!  I don't know if you are familiar with the technology, but it doesn't matter,  Those days are over, thank God!

In case you didn't know, long ago cassette tapes were common before the advent of compact discs, which was before hard drives, which was before flash memory.  It's hard to say that optical drives are better than hard drives are better than flash memory, but all of the above are better than cassette tapes.  Generally when you listen to music, you are aware of 2 tracks: the left and the right, for your left ear and your right ear.  A 4 track allows one to add maybe another voice or a guitar to those left and right tracks, and you could put those new tracks on the left, or the right, or the middle, or in between.  Of course, you could start from scratch and record guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, and arrange their position relative to your 2 ears.  Back when, the big record companies had 48 track machines in their studios, and they used 2 inch reel to reel tapes.  Which obviously made time in the studio very expensive, added to the many more walls available in a studio as opposed to a bedroom.  Therefore the cost of making and selling recorded music is what drove many a musician into slavery.  Of course this cost is offset by sales and royalties from public performances (radio, TV, etc.) but few artistes are able to garner and maintain mass exposure.

The inventors of computers didn't know they were creating a monster, but they did, and their work was and is rapidly compounded by others.  So really, God is the One who created the monster, which currently resides on your cell phone, which could probably be configured as a recording studio.  This new technology quickly made the old ways obsolete, and now anyone with a cell phone can be a radio or TV producer.  Down with the oppressive media moguls.  Truly the Grace of God is for only God to administer to whomever God wills, and is out of reach from the willpower of humans.