This made the setup look loads more impressive.
Next, I sold my collection of guitars with prongs and bought a Roland JX-8P and a Super Bass Station to keep the mixer company. While down in London on a business trip, I made possibly my biggest audio technology mistake ever, buying a Terratec EWS64 soundcard. Fact: EWS is short for Eilegender-Woll-milch-Sau which is German for "Bodged together abomination with two stereo outputs that drift out of sync and a built-in sampler that never plays the same thing twice"
Then I got some money from a consulting job I was doing for Numark, and bought a M-Audio Delta-66 soundcard, a fancy rackmount synth, and a sampler. And a slightly newer, bigger, and less knackered mixer.
This made the setup look loads more impressive.
It didn't look so good once I'd moved out of my mum and dad's house and smushed it all into the bedroom of a student flat. Nevertheless this is what I used to write almost all of the tunes on Way Of The Bedroom Worrier.
Now I have a day job and a whole apartment to fill with stuff, whee. I got hold of a Soundcraft mixer, an Alesis Ion, some fancy Dynaudio speakers and a few more rack mount thingies. Many of the Ten To Five Project songs were recorded and/or mixed on this setup. Unfortunately still the same old computer that could only run about three VST plugins before blowing a fuse.
Last year I finally got a new computer that could run modern stuff like Pro Tools and Ableton! It's a 3GHz P4 with a M-Audio Delta 1010 soundcard, dual hard drives and loads of everything. I built it and installed everything from scratch, which included having to buy a license for Windows XP :(
Yay, I even have patchbays now. I've also grown my hair and tried to smile more.
I ended up selling quite a lot of this stuff off, because there wasn't much room in my flat for anything else :-) Software makes most of it obsolete anyway.