Its been a long time since I got to jam with some of my old band mates from the bad ole days. On Saturday night, for one night only Matt, bassist/guitarist with many of our bands, and my good self will be laying down some tracks. Hopefully we'll have a truly terrible EP recorded by the end of the night. Or at least the instruments and vocals ready for some knob twiddling. Last night I was sampling some of the wonderful sounds from the The Hobbit for Spectrum 48k on my lovely old tape recorder. Rewind is broken, but if you flip the tape over you can use fast forward! The playback quality on that very heavy sucker is really really good. Which is handy as I have tons of amazing material on old cassettes worthy of sampling. I pity the kids of today who don't know the dubious joys of the c90. Ah the brown gold spilling out of infeasibly complex clear plastic tape bodies to embrace the play heads in a gordian knot of audio lovin'!
The fact I now have two Macs with GarageBand, Reason and Audacity ready to roll does seem something of a betrayal of our roots splicing tapes together and overdubbing on one track machines by putting tape over the wipe head and all that jazz. Heck I have an excellent sequencer on my ipod touch for goodness' sakes! Its almost too easy, and getting the sound of teh wonderful in digital media is actually more work, and avoiding some bs "lofi" posturing is an effort. Luckily my playing is so terribly bad that much of the integrity will be present however it is recorded.
In celebration of our impending sonic victory you can listen to some of the old band's material here. If you dare:
http://www.myspace.com/dougboodoo7The photos section there is a goldmine.
http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=96906041&albumID=0&imageID=902978