I was asked by management to come up with an audio interface specifically for the Apple Garageband recording application. This is a product that would be sold at the Apple Store. I thought it would be great if the product had a control surface too. So I came up with the control surface that you see in the picture, but it also had a guitar input and headphone output on the front of the unit with an XLR mic input and RCA outputs on the rear. Originally there were also some metering LEDs on the top for the I/O.

They decided to turn it in to two products instead. The control surface became the iControl and the interface became the first FastTrack.

My goal was to make the control surface look exactly like the software. Right down to the faux wood paneling!

Management thought they could really make some margin on this product and priced it way too high, so it didn't sell as well as it could have.

However, users of Apple's Logic Pro software took notice and you'll still find these in many of their studios. To this day you can still find them on Ebay for $25 to $50! They're worth every penny!