Why Did I Take My Break?

As some of you may already know, I attended the Michael Wagener Recording Workshop back in January of 2006. Wagener has recorded probably 20 albums that I own and it was an enormous learning experience. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I can’t think of a better way to throw away $2500! I was able to sit down and eat with so many of engineers and producers that I looked up. It was exciting! However, there was one common theme. All of them had dedicated 100% of their time to recording. They weren’t doing recording 30 hours per week and then running peer to peer sites 40 hours per week. They were working 70 hours per week on recording. The lesson learned was that if I was going to succeed, I was going to have to decide between running big enterprise websites or recording music.

I decided that to dedicate nearly 100% of my time into a website called TextLinkCenter.com. I wrote all the php code / mysql programming. Unfortunately, we made some big mistakes when creating TextLinkCenter.com and the end result is worked day and night, 7 days a week, to end up with a site that didn’t make me a dime. I would have been better off recording music. The entire time I was engaged in the epic undertaking of learning / writing php code I really just wanted to be recording music.

Now that I’ve thrown in the towel on TextLinkCenter.com for the time being, I’d rather just record a band today. At this point in time, I don’t care about making a million bucks. I just don’t want to work 80 hours per week for 6 months with nothing to show for it.

Unfortunately, there were some casualties in my decision to focus all my time and energy on big time web enterprises. There were bands who pushed me to record them. I drug my feet. They wanted me to record them. I WANTED to record them, but felt morally obligated to focus on my web work. The fact that I was doing my best not to be tempted by the recording bug led to all kind of problems. There were some huge problems with communication that resulted from my simply not checking my email enough.

However, all of that is past me. I’m EXCITED about helping bands make the best recording possible. I’m not trying to make any platinum records. In fact, I really don’t care if any of the albums I record this year sell more than 2 copies. I just want to make ruckus worth listening to! Let the card’s fall where they may.