{"id":2546,"date":"2008-05-09T07:54:23","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T12:54:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2546"},"modified":"2008-05-09T07:54:23","modified_gmt":"2008-05-09T12:54:23","slug":"hot-gear-friday-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2546","title":{"rendered":"Hot Gear Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s gear isn’t “hot” in the sense of “really really great”.\u00a0 Indeed, in the great continuum of electronics, especially electronics available today, it’s a comical throwback.<\/p>\n

But 20-odd years ago, it was the stuff of dreams.<\/p>\n

Not long after I started playing guitar, I started having delusions of grandeur.\u00a0 The delusions were not unlike the ones I got shortly after starting this blog, things like “getting back into talk radio…” – well, you get the picture.\u00a0 My delusions back then centered around “being able to dub multiple instruments onto the same piece of tape, so I could make records without needing a whole band”.<\/p>\n

Sort of like “Multi track tape” – reel to reel tapes with many “tracks”, each with its own record and play heads, so you could record and synch many instruments and vocal tracks – without having to spend what it took for a multi-track tape recorder back then.
\nWhich was a lot.\u00a0 A four-track recorder was usually well over $1,000; eight-tracks were pushing $2K, as\u00a0 recall, and 16, 24 and more tracks were the province of recording studios that cost more than most houses I grew up around.<\/p>\n

So money was an obstacle.\u00a0 So was my own lack of technical ingenuity; my first attempt at recording more than one instrument involved playing a guitar track into a cassette recorder, then replaying it as I played along and recorded the whole thing onto another <\/em>cassette recorder.\u00a0 It worked, except that the first track was buried in playback noise from the first cassette player; by the third “track”, the background noise from the multiple layers of cassette players made the whole production sound like “guitars playing in a gale”.<\/p>\n

In college, I experimented with “bouncing” tracks back and forth on a reel-to-reel player, which had two tracks (known to most stereo-listening laypeople as “left” and “right”.).\u00a0 It worked, sort of – I got four instruments down, once – before the overlaid layers of track noise overwhelmed the instruments.<\/p>\n

There had to be a better way.<\/p>\n

And in 1984, it came along.<\/p>\n

Now, there’d been cassette-based four-tracks since the early ’80s; Bruce Springsteen recorded his Nebraska <\/em>album on the first of them, a Teac “Tascam” four-track cassette; the unit cost about $1,000, which was still a little <\/strike>lot too spendy for me.<\/p>\n

But in ’84, along came the answer, the vehicle to my megalomaniac recording dreams:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Fostex X15 was the first “inexpensive” ($400) cassette recorder.\u00a0 It let you record on two tracks at a time, mix down four tracks into a stereo two track mix…<\/p>\n

…and, since it had an internal monitor circuit, allowed you to record tracks to other tracks.\u00a0 Which meant you could “bounce” mix two or three tracks onto one, to clear a track or two for more recording.\u00a0 This was a common technique in high-end studios in the sixties, when the four-track reel-to-reel was high technology (Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band <\/em>was recorded on four-track decks, although “decks” is plural).<\/p>\n

And so in January of 1985, I sat down in the pump room at my college chapel with a drum kit, a 1916 Steinway, and my guitars and bass and a Farfisa organ I’d found under a stack of old programs, and started recording entire band arrangements of songs.<\/p>\n

My pride and joy?\u00a0 One song where I…:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. laid down a metronome track<\/li>\n
  2. played the rhythm guitar part to guide the whole song<\/li>\n
  3. Laid down a drum track<\/li>\n
  4. Cut a bass track<\/li>\n
  5. Bounced the bass and drums over the metronome on track one<\/li>\n
  6. Played a big, broad piano part<\/li>\n
  7. Bouned the piano and rhytm guitar together<\/li>\n
  8. Played an organ part<\/li>\n
  9. Did a last with the vocals (with the lead guitar fitting in where I wasn’t singing).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I think I worked on it until 5 one morning.\u00a0 And listened to it\u00a0 the whole next day.\u00a0 It sounded…<\/p>\n

    …cool.\u00a0 LIke I could actually do <\/em>this recording thing.<\/p>\n

    I went on to work wtih much bigger, better recording gear later on.\u00a0 And of course, today you can record on your computer across dozens of tracks (with the aid of a decent sound card, at least) for a fraction of the price of an old reel to reel player.<\/p>\n

    But the Fostx made it all possible for me.<\/p>\n

    I still have it, somewhere…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Today’s gear isn’t “hot” in the sense of “really really great”.\u00a0 Indeed, in the great continuum of electronics, especially electronics available today, it’s a comical throwback. But 20-odd years ago, it was the stuff of dreams. Not long after I started playing guitar, I started having delusions of grandeur.\u00a0 The delusions were not unlike the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hot-gear-friday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}