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garrett@trott

About

I've spent most of my life around things that make noise, things that fall out of the sky, and things with screws in them.

35 years
behind a drum kit
1,000+
jumps, none of them graceful
15 years
of live sound
Kewpie
mini Aussie, unpaid

Drums first

Thirty-five years in and I'm still working on the same four bars. Drumming teaches timing over speed, and the value of the notes you leave out, which is a lesson I apparently have to relearn every time I open an editor.

Caring how drums sound led to caring how everything sounds, which led to fifteen years of live sound and festival production. The show starts at eight whether or not you've found the problem. You learn to move fast, carry spares, and distrust any cable you haven't personally tested.

Then things with screws in them

At some point the gear got more interesting than the gig. Why does this preamp sound like that? What's inside it? Can I fix it instead of buying another one? Usually yes, and usually the fix takes four times longer than buying another one would have.

That turned into software and hardware. I'm self employed now, building systems for myself and for whoever hires me: inventory that knows what's in every bin, a cluster in a closet running things I'd otherwise rent, databases that turn vendor PDFs into something queryable. Same instinct as live sound, with fewer people waiting.

Skydiving

Past a thousand jumps. The one hobby that doesn't involve building anything, though it does involve a lot of gear maintenance, so I may be fooling myself.

The discipline rhymes with the rest of it. Check your equipment, know the procedures, respect the parts that can hurt you, then go have fun. Nothing about it is casual, which is most of the appeal.

Kewpie

Mini American shepherd. Sits in the workshop with no technical opinions but firm views on when the workday ends. She's usually right and I usually ignore her.

This site

Projects, notes, and the occasional writeup of something that didn't work. I'm starting to film some of it too, mostly because the interesting part is the middle, and the middle never makes it into the finished photo.

Elsewhere