I was forced to close down Golden Midi after about 20 months of operations. I offered the catalog to Passport Designs, a California company that makes sequencing software. Their having asked me a year earlier "How can we get in on this?", they agreed that we should talk. That phone conversation took place just a few minutes before the La Prieta earthquake of 1989, the epicenter of which was not far from the company's location in Half Moon Bay.

I flew out there the next morning, driving south from SFO through areas that clearly had been hit hard by the quake. When I arrived at the company we got right to work. No socializing, just bitter coffee. The receptionist had expressed surprise that I hadn't cancelled the trip but I explained that, having spent considerable time in SOCAL as a kid, I was not put off by earthquakes.

The receptionist was the only person there who treated me like a human being. They had me over a barrel, they knew it, and they intended to exploit their top dog position for everything it was worth. After all, if they didn't buy the catalog, who would?

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There's nothing wrong with that other than its furthering a reputation that, in my opinion, was for being ruthless not only with competitors but also with the stores and end users who were their customers. (To avoid the possibility of a lawsuit even after these 20 years, from time to time I'm going to say "in my opinion" here. This removes all grounds for possible legal action since the things I will be saying are in fact my opinions. :))

Greed is legal, and crushing the competition is also legal within limits. They had just hired a "mergers and acquisitions" flunky and I was this guy's first case. In my opinion he was determined to acquire the Golden Midi catalog at the absolute rock bottom price he could force me to accept.

Anticipating that something like this might happen, I had brought along a deal sweetener -- a demonstration of some remarkable postproduction software that they could also buy from me if we could come to terms that I would like. Anyway, the demo took the form of two stereo studio recordings of our magnificient sequenced version of Les Elgart's "Bandstand", which you know as the theme of the American Bandstand TV show.

The first stereo recording was of a quantized version of our master sequence. Quantization is a software proceedure that places all the notes and other musical events on precise time markers. So, for example, if you have a keyboard chord that was played in live and whose notes occurred within a 30 millisecond time span, quantization will cause all those notes to occur within about one millisecond.

The result is dead music, a complete loss of whatever live feel existed in the original. You've heard this kind of music before. You call it "elevator music", and this is exactly why we did as many instrument tracks as possible as live takes.

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Being a combination programmer, musician and entrepreneur, it occurred to me one day that I could write software that would take a dead, quantized, sequence and bring it to life. By the time that idea had occured to me I already knew more than I ever dreamed possible about how to arrange notes in time and space. So I put on my thinking cap, made reasonable extrapolations of what I knew, wrote software to implement those extrapolations, and the result was nothing short of miraculous.

I'm not going to reveal the techniques here because at some point I may want to patent the process. Suffice it to say that experiments confirmed what I believed I had finally figured out -- exactly what makes live music sound live. Certainly nobody has done anything like what I built, which amounted to back-end production software driven by our master sequences. At first I was simply "sparkling" (as I called it) our already live feel masters, but as I gained experience with the technique I built a quantizer right into the upstream end of the sparkler and then turned the algorithms loose on the quantized version of the sequence.

This meant that the software could take quantized sequences built by my competitors and make them sound live. I believed, incorrectly, that Passport would want the technology since it would allow them to create sequences using musicians of a lower calibre than Golden Midi had been using.

So the second tape of the demo was of the "sparkled" version of Bandstand. Note that both recordings featured the identical tone generators rendering the identical musical events, set to standard volumes and standard voices, and with identical arrangement of the instruments in the stereo field.

The only repeat only difference between the two stereo recordings was that Tape A was quantized whereas Tape B had been sparkled.

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Before the negotiations got seriously underway I said to the company president (also a musician/entrepreneur) and the M&A guy "Look. I've brought a demo along of our postproduction software. What it can do may be of interest to you. I'm not going to tell you what it does unless you agree to buy it. Instead I'm simply going to play Tape A and then Tape B and let you decide whether there's anything to this technology."

So I played the tapes, the quantized Tape A followed by the sparkled tape B. As B got underway the company president had to leave the room to take a phone call. After a few more seconds the M&A guy said "Big deal, this one's in stero."

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I was disappointed, of course, but not surprised. Why should a numbers guy be expected to have anything more than a tin ear? I think that the company president might have understood the difference between A and B, but he was out of the room by then, and anyway experience had taught me that people are aware of this stuff mainly subliminally. If he was one of the many musicians who really didn't hear music consciously then the importance of the B tape would be lost on him.

But it didn't matter because the president had delegated complete authority for the deal to the man I will call SOB because, in my opinion, that's exactly what he was and probably still is. When the president left the room he did not come back, and it was SOB and me mano a mano.

SOB asked me what I wanted for the catalog. "Fifty thousand" I told him. "I'll give you twenty" he said.

No way. No f-wording way. Being a pretty fair salesman I talked about the kind of success that Golden Midi had enjoyed, and I tried to show him how this catalog would allow them not simply to jump start their planned entry into the sequenced music business (which is why they wanted the catalog) but also why there was every reason for them to expect that the catalog would allow them to have an instant sizeable sales volume.

No deal. We went around and around for two hours, with him never budging from twenty thousand.

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Now you must remember that not only do I have Celtic Writing Genes, I also have Celtic Anger Genes. There was no way I was going to give these folks the satisfaction of launching a big time business using me as a low-cost booster stage.

So I told SOB that the deal was off, asked to use a phone, called my wife and told her to expect me for a late dinner, and that I would be taking the next available flight to NYC, which was where I had moved our studio. I told her what had happened and she agreed that we should not conclude the deal. Her pride was as strong as mine.

Meanwhile, the phone I was allowed to use was in an office with no door, so SOB was able to overhear my conversation with my wife. When he realized that I was completely serious and was just about to walk out on him he said "Okay. I'll come up to twenty-five but I want your customer list, I want you to write a report for us about how we should enter this business, and I want you to agree never to enter this business again.

"Close" I said, "But no cigar. I'll give you a one-year non-compete agreement but that's it. And while I'll be giving you our new master sequences, I'm going to keep derivatives of them in case I do decide to start a competing business."

"Okay" he said. We shook hands on the deal. He never understood that what I delivered was the newly-quantized masters, and that the derivative versions I held back were the live feel versions (from which the quantized masters could be reconstructed anytime I wanted).

So that's what they got -- quantized sequences -- and they never understood why they weren't able to sell stuff in anything like the quantities I had discussed in my report, which was 100% honest.

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