Step eight: Listen to vinyl

Step eight: "Digital music sucks the soul out of songs, but vinyl stores music in its true uncompressed form. Try using a record player for those times when singing won't do."

I'd never owned or used a record player before, but I learnt very quickly that it's pretty basic technology. There's no shuffle mode  and if you want to change the artist currently playing, you have to change the record, which is much less intuitive than using a click wheel.

The other thing I noticed is that record players aren't portable. I had a genius idea, though -- I taped one to myself. "Clever me," I thought as I wandered round London, although not a lot of music played without a power source and an amp.

At home, however, I started to value my music much more, because rather than having thousands of songs, most of which I never listened to, I started paying more attention to what I wanted to put on next. And thanks to the scratches on my old records, the player even re-mixed some of my tracks for me on the fly.