“Still Inspired” by David Levy, Apple.com

From the day he and his brother found a “Meet The Beatles” LP on a dusty road in Melbourne, Florida, guitarist-engineer-producer Jeff Worrell has worn his love of music on his sleeve. His journey has touched on every aspect of music-making – from the cramped roadhouses with dance riffs to rocking huge stadiums with crystalline live sound to mentoring other musicians with his engineering, production and technical skills.

Worrell spent five years on the road as guitarist with Natalie Cole’s soul band. He then leaped from the stage to front-of-house engineering, sculpting sound for world tours by America, Fleetwood Mac, Dave Mason, Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo, Bread, Sheena Easton, and the Edgar Winter Band.

It was Winter who inspired him to dive headfirst into Mac-based recording when he co-engineered and co-mastered one of the first all-digital CD’s, Winter’s 1994 release “Not A Kid Anymore.”We’d experimented with other platforms, but as soon as Edgar and I got into the Mac environment it was, “Wow, this is so elegant, so refined, so easy,” recalls Jeff. “It was an epiphany for me, because the interface was a no-brainer. It just flowed. To this day, as it’s evolved, the Mac has remained very intuitive and organic to me. I feel like I’m not dealing with an inanimate object. It’s alive, it’s responsive, it communicates.””I play guitar, bass, keyboards, program drums, sing, do background vocals. So having everything in my hands is the best of all possible worlds, with no limitations. You’re in command of getting the entire job done, without spending big bucks on a studio. And that’s why so many musicians are moving to Macs and the mobility of Powerbooks. Anything and everything is ready to be worked on, anywhere – on the bus, in the hotel room.””For me, and for the musicians I work with, that’s like handing a kid the keys to the candy store.”