In 1987 I purchased an Emu-Systems Emax sampler. It was the first wave of 12 bit audio sampling technology on the market. It had real sounding drums, and when Eddie heard the snare on my new sampler, he immediately wanted to use it on his demo's. Although we had conflicting schedules, we were able to work out some time to meet at my house for his recording.
The first time he ever came over to my house to record was a memorable one. As he approached my condo from the walkway to the street, he carried his four track tape recorder in an ugly yellow tub wrapped with blankets. He had it cradled against his chest walking very carefully. He was very proud of his seemingly delicate machine. It were as if he was carrying his first new born baby. As he approached me he said, "This is it", referring to his cool machine. We went inside and set up the equipment. Eddie preferred to play the drums in real time rather than programming them. He preferred the more human feel to actually playing them. As Eddie began playing the drums on the keyboard, he began pounding on them harder and harder until the keyboard was frantically shaking and almost bouncing. "Yo, Stop!.", I shouted. Eddie saw my signal to stop. He pulled off the headphones and said, "That snare is fucking amazing ." I said, "Dude, your going to damage the keys playing it like that. You don't have to hit them that hard. Its not going to sound any different. It's not like I paid $2300 for the damn thing. Come on."
Eddie apologized for getting too carried away and put the headphones back on again. About two minutes later he worked his way into a drumming frenzy, again. I must have stopped him 6 times that day. I tried to be as nice as I could. Needless to say, he got his demo finished and luckily I retained my sampler in working order.
Once Eddie was finished with his first demo tape, he was extremely excited. He ordered a large quantity of short 20 minute cassette tapes from a mail order company. Once he received them he began to make copies from his cassette master tape. He gave copies to everyone at work as well as a few close friends.