As a child I remember being taken to symphonies, and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. The symphonies made no impression, but the G&S was mind-expanding. Then when I was a young teenager, two folk singers came to my school. No idea who they were, and I don't remember much about their actual concert, but I was among a group of a few boys who happened to run into them afterwards in the parking lot. They treated us to an extra song, right there, "Riley's Daughter". It had a space in the tune where the performer tapped the guitar twice to indicate what he was contemplating for Riley's daughter rather than saying it out loud. At the time, I had no idea you could be so openly salacious and still walk the earth, so that was mind-expanding too.

I use all gears between first and reverse inclusive. I play a Yamaha KX8 MIDI keyboard into Sonar Producer on a Windows 7 system named Walt. The sampled piano I'm using at the moment is the Black Grand from SampleTekk. My favorite piece of equipment is the "Double Decker", AHA! Music Technology's most advanced and capacious sheet music display, as depicted in the photos section.

Bill Dobbin was a big one, as for many others.

Shakespeare. The small talk between songs would be fantastic even if he turned out to be not too good on his lute.

I would look first for a desert island survival guide on CD, and plenty of batteries. But for music I'd take something deep enough that it could survive many hearings and still reward listening. Perhaps a set of Bach fugues, or the late string quartets of Beethoven or Shostakovitch. If given a choice between any number of recordings and an instrument, I'd take the latter.