Personally my music started when I was 10 when I saved up for my first guitar. About a year later my Dad saw how much I was playing and bought me a Tascam Porta 01 and a drum machine from my guitar teachers recommendation.
Those sat around for a couple of years till I caught the bug somehow and started recording every cheesy song I`d written to that point with crappy drum machine parts and lots of guitar solos.
I upgraded to a better tape deck and pemanantly borrowed a peavey console and 2 enormous stacks of P.A. speakers that I mixed through. Yeah!!
A couple years later I bought a Tascam 8 track and a Ramsa analog console. This was the beginning of my funk/reggae stage so i had to get the hang of bouncing 20 - 30 or so tracks onto the damn thing which really got my ears tuned into levels and panning.
Some time after that I fell in love with the guitar center catalog and started buying all sorts of crap I thought would be better that turned out to be worse like an Alesis mixer and ADAts.(worst buy ever!) I also got a Joe Meek SC3 (still can`t get the damn thing sounding good) and a Blueberry and a 414.
Very soon after that I found GM and Roger Nichols forum and realized everything I had was crap and finally started buying decent pres a PSX100 and a load of other stuff. Once I found Gearslutz it was all over (again) and I started selling off stuff (again) and now I think I`ve finally got some things I wont end selling for the next 5 years or so.
During this time I`ve played in about 20 different bands of varying musical levels and helped record some cds which went nowhere.
I still play a lot of music and I`m finally starting to pull in some $ from the other people I`m recording.
I hope in a year or so I`ll be at this fulltime and can finally justify the rediculous amounts of $ I`ve been spending on this over the years instead of cars and houses.