Missed it by this much...
So I helped clean out a good chunk of my old possessions from my folks' place over the holiday. It was pretty cool going through old stuff (it was less cool getting a lot of it to fit into the car for the drive back to VA).
One thing that was particularly exciting for me was finding an old cassette tape, but not having a working tape deck until I got back to my gear at the house.
Maybe I should back up a bit. Around the transition from high school to college I was in a band that had no name. I had just recently finished what would become the debacle of my first recording project (the first of 3 PAT portfolios that all yielded the same results, in which I experienced my first lessons with adapted environments, signal routing, stereophonic sound), and was eager to take the plunge into playing in a band and recording demos. Bill, Mike and I had jammed 4-5 times, and Ron had joined us about a month previously. Bill convinced Jim to drop by and provide the vocals. We were a real band, with a full lineup.
Anyway, at this particular session in Mike's basement, we finally sat down and started jamming out on something that wasn't a cover song. Bill stumbled upon a pensive riff, Mike added a sparse lead, and Ron and I each worked up a simple addition for the rhythm section. Jim ad-libbed some words he didn't plan to keep. We had the foundation of a song.
So we grabbed Jim's mic, which was attached to a karaoke machine, and tried to record the free-form version of the song for posterity. This was my first real experience with critical mic placement, as we struggled to find the right location for the mic on the basement floor amidst the amps and drums where it wouldn't under-represent any one part. We jammed out for what felt like forever, but was probably only about 4 minutes. Everything had been captured. This was also my first real experience with mic response and tape saturation: when we played back the cassette it sounded dramatically different over the speakers of the karaoke machine (and later in my dad's old blue van) than it did when played live. I took the tape home with me, intending to transfer the contents to computer. I remember that it was because I had just stumbled across a cool piece of software called "Audacity" for the first time when I needed to edit my first PAT portfolio. It was an exciting time.
For better or for worse, this was also my first real lesson in prompt archiving: within a few weeks that tape was gone from my grasps. Over time we worked on other stuff, and I expanded my knowledge of recording little by little (I'm actually a little amazed by how much I've learned since then). The tape moved to the back of my mind. Until this past week, that is.
The tape I found was not, unfortunately, the tape for that initial session. It was a recording of riffs done by Mike and me about 8 months later that I had previously found and had promptly archived to computer in the summer of 2003. Incidentally, if Bill/Mike/Ron/Jim happens to read this and wants to hear it, I've still got the files in .wav and .mp3: post a comment and we'll get it figured out.
I shudder to listen to some of the technical issues with the demo I do have, but it's pretty cool having a small chunk of history chronicling that period in my life. It's also nice to see I've made some progress in the art of production (see for yourself: new sampler tracks have been posted to my MySpace page).
I do wonder whatever happened to that old tape...
-Dave
One thing that was particularly exciting for me was finding an old cassette tape, but not having a working tape deck until I got back to my gear at the house.
Maybe I should back up a bit. Around the transition from high school to college I was in a band that had no name. I had just recently finished what would become the debacle of my first recording project (the first of 3 PAT portfolios that all yielded the same results, in which I experienced my first lessons with adapted environments, signal routing, stereophonic sound), and was eager to take the plunge into playing in a band and recording demos. Bill, Mike and I had jammed 4-5 times, and Ron had joined us about a month previously. Bill convinced Jim to drop by and provide the vocals. We were a real band, with a full lineup.
Anyway, at this particular session in Mike's basement, we finally sat down and started jamming out on something that wasn't a cover song. Bill stumbled upon a pensive riff, Mike added a sparse lead, and Ron and I each worked up a simple addition for the rhythm section. Jim ad-libbed some words he didn't plan to keep. We had the foundation of a song.
So we grabbed Jim's mic, which was attached to a karaoke machine, and tried to record the free-form version of the song for posterity. This was my first real experience with critical mic placement, as we struggled to find the right location for the mic on the basement floor amidst the amps and drums where it wouldn't under-represent any one part. We jammed out for what felt like forever, but was probably only about 4 minutes. Everything had been captured. This was also my first real experience with mic response and tape saturation: when we played back the cassette it sounded dramatically different over the speakers of the karaoke machine (and later in my dad's old blue van) than it did when played live. I took the tape home with me, intending to transfer the contents to computer. I remember that it was because I had just stumbled across a cool piece of software called "Audacity" for the first time when I needed to edit my first PAT portfolio. It was an exciting time.
For better or for worse, this was also my first real lesson in prompt archiving: within a few weeks that tape was gone from my grasps. Over time we worked on other stuff, and I expanded my knowledge of recording little by little (I'm actually a little amazed by how much I've learned since then). The tape moved to the back of my mind. Until this past week, that is.
The tape I found was not, unfortunately, the tape for that initial session. It was a recording of riffs done by Mike and me about 8 months later that I had previously found and had promptly archived to computer in the summer of 2003. Incidentally, if Bill/Mike/Ron/Jim happens to read this and wants to hear it, I've still got the files in .wav and .mp3: post a comment and we'll get it figured out.
I shudder to listen to some of the technical issues with the demo I do have, but it's pretty cool having a small chunk of history chronicling that period in my life. It's also nice to see I've made some progress in the art of production (see for yourself: new sampler tracks have been posted to my MySpace page).
I do wonder whatever happened to that old tape...
-Dave