I find myself going for a lot more gigs than I ever remember. In the 15 odd years of being in the music business, I rarely stepped out for gigs. Maybe it was because i was anyway surrounded by music all the time, the last thing I wanted to do in my free time was go and listen to more music.

At the gig though, I found myself having a great time, albeit as always, wanted to edit some of the songs that the band was playing. I got into this habit about a decade ago, when I started producing music & realised that editing songs, even from basic mp3 files one rips off YouTube is easy. the first song I remember editing was Deadmau5’s “Strobe”, followed by “Down with Disease”, by Phish, which has this guitar lick at the end I just couldn’t get enough of.

This weekend, as I sat down and edited the songs into “my versions” of the songs, I realised that this desire to customise things is not limited to just music. As far as I can remember, I’ve always been compelled to constantly change things I came across.

When I started playing the drums & got into rock music, YouTube didn’t exist & live concerts & instructional lesson videos were hard to come by. To change this, I found a bootlegger in Palika Bazaar (Pyramid) & bought three CD’s of the drum instructional videos that I wanted & at my next drum lesson, spouted some of the tricks I’d learnt from these. This simple act, led to everyone at the school asking for the specific lessons, which I promptly mixed into one compilation with different lessons from the three CD’s, made copies on my CD Writer at home & sold for a reasonable amount of money. Fuelled by this, I went back to the store & continued this exercise, which supported a lot of the illicit activities that are usually accompanied by playing in a rock & roll band.

I see the same thing when it comes to the vehicles I drive. Never satisfied with the car or bike off the shelf, I usually end up changing most things over the course of my owning them. For instance, the tires & wheels, air filter & exhaust are the first to go. The suspension, ECU & the seats come next & finally, I almost always end up changing a large part of the engine too.

Interestingly though, this is only limited to a few things. For most things though, I’m not interested at all in changing anything, preferring to use them out of the box as they were meant to be. For instance, I’ve never messed around with my technology, choosing to use the standard OS, no pirated software or anything else.

If I think about it, I realise that this might just be a tinkerers restless brain, working on making things that matter to me different and occasionally, better.