Silent Way has offered audio and Macintosh consulting, recording services, and equipment rentals to the Northern California community since 1993. This site was launched in 1996 to provide clients with access to a vast private archive of technical info and thousands of industry URLs. This initial goal was quickly achieved and surpassed due to net growth and unexpected worldwide interest. The site has grown immensely, and is a unique collection of info which has helped hundreds of thousands of visitors learn about music and technology.

SilentWay.com gets 300,000 hits per month. (Approximately 50,000 unique visitors per month; almost 14 million successful requests and 4.5 million successful page requests since 5/2002, and many more since 1996. See below for more traffic statistics.)

At last count this domain had about 390,000 words, 3300 external links, 335 pages, hundreds of rows of MySQL data fed to PHP pages, 140 images and a bunch of files.

None of these numbers include the sibling websites tastycast.com, ultimatetracksheet.com, tonybrooke.com, djappropriate.com, thevid.com, silentway.net and a bunch more. That's a long way from the first page in 1996.

I named my business Silent Way in 1993 (after a few years of independent contracting). It was named in homage to the landmark album by Miles Davis, "In a Silent Way," and the title track written by Joe Zawinul.

I'm a major Miles fan, inspired by his music and what he achieved. His innovation in genre transcendence and compositional collaboration changed the way people hear and make music. He communicated so effectively that he could make silence impart meaning. He didn't bullshit and never pulled punches. Just listen... it's all right there in his music.

My philosophy for this company echoes that vibe, so these pages deliver info that is succinct and effective. To increase speed, it is mostly text-based and the design is deliberately spartan. No schmancy Flash intro, animations, DHTML, soundtrack audio, Java apps, dancing logos or gratuitous eye candy (although these are all well within my means). There is only Cascading Style Sheets and a few simple javascripts, neither of which will cripple the site if a browser can't parse them. Any browser or platform is welcome here. Besides, I'm a music content guy, not a visual artist.

For more on how to support this site, see How To Support Silent Way.

The only part of the site that was not created by Tony Brooke is the cool logo, designed by bluedreamers (graphic design for hire). Also, the forum is a modified version of the opensource phpBB system, and there was some database R&D work done for tastycast.com by Eliot Stock (whizkid programmer for hire).

Tell a friend about this site, and let me know what you think! Visitors are more than just aggregate statistical data to me. They deserve to be treated like individual numbers, um, I mean, people.

You could download the Sherlock search plug-in for silentway.com here. What else does the site have? check out the sitemap.

    - Tony Brooke (more about me in this boring life story and in my personal pages.)