* How long have you been doing this?
Most of my adult life. The fascination began in high school. I almost hate to admit it, but this was back in the mid-70's. Somehow I was able to save up enough money to buy a nice 4 track reel-reel tape deck (a Dokorder) along with some mics and stuff. During my senior year in high school, I was working part-time at a local Radio Shack store in Crystal Lake. The manager of the store was an ex-recording engineer. He, in turn, hired a few of his unemployed recording buddies and so I found myself surrounded by people with a considerable amount of recording experience. This particular store wasn't like the Radio Shack stores you see today. This one had a really nice stereo room in the back and sold brand names like Pioneer, Technics and Akai in addition to the cheaper Realistic stuff. So I had a chance to ask a lot of questions and talk "shop" with these guys. I was only 17 or 18 at the time. None of these guys took me seriously. I was kinda like a pet to them :-)
Unfortunately, there was a limit to the amount of information these cats were willing to share. Which was a pretty common problem back in the day. Insider studio information was a closely guarded secret. There were no books or videos or instructional materials like there are today. No siree. You learned what you needed to learn as an apprentice and you held that knowledge closely. Home enthusiasts like me had to resort to trial and error to get anything accomplished. I remember buying a record that was made by Tascam, which was a sort of demonstration disc highlighting the capabilities of their multi-track tape decks. This record was like a God-send to me because they provided actual audio samples of various recording tricks that you could apply to your own home-based recordings. So as little pieces of information came my way, I'd immediately run home and experiment. That was really how it all started. It helped too that I played guitar at the time (although not very well). I'd invite friends over for little jam sessions and I'd throw up the mics and try recording a bit.
A 5-year stint in the Air Force followed high school. I was trained as a radar technician. I spent the last two years of my enlistment over in Germany. By that time, my guitar chops had improved to the point where I was able to put together a little rock band and play at various bars and clubs in the area. That was a trip. I continued playing in bands when I returned home as a civilian. I was also doing a lot of demo recording in local studios. That experience that has served me well. Because of my technical training, I was usually the guy in the band that took care of maintaining all the equipment.
In the mid-80's I managed to get a job as a manufacturing engineer working for Zenith Electronics which was a fairly well-known producer of televisions and other consumer electronics products. I worked for Zenith for almost 18 years before the industry bottomed-out and our division was shut down (yeah, that old chestnut). All during this time I dabbled as a weekend warrior musician and kept experimenting with home recording technology. There were little or no job opportunities for manufacturing engineers anymore so I decided to go full-time with this studio. I was already making money with it as a "hobby out of control" so it seemed like a good idea to go full-time with it. So I did. So that's basically my story.