Do you remember your first recording ?

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grimtraveller

grimtraveller

If only for a moment.....
Can you remember the first piece of music you actually put together and recorded ? What was it recorded on and what instruments did you use ? Do you recall any difficulties you came across and how you overcame them ? How did it sound to you then and what do you think of it now ?
 
The first thing I ever recorded was with a friend of mine in my old shed at my parents house. We had my Encore Strat copy guitar (it was my first guitar) and I only knew 3 chords then. Two tape recorders, a DJ/Turntable mixer and a Shure something or other microphone. I still have the tape of it somewhere, it was a right noise. It was the first song I ever wrote. Proper terrible. I figured I could overdub from tape to tape that way. It worked but not for guitar. It lost tuning with each generation.

The first proper recording, a few months later, was in the same shed, with the same friend, with the same microphone but on a Tascam 4 track cassette recorder and the song we recorded was That'll Be The Day. (Buddy Holly) Which I also still have on cassette somewhere.
 
Yeah these open ended questions belong in Prime Time or the Cave where you can yammer on about them. This has nothing helpful for newbs either.
 
The first thing I ever recorded was a class where we did all we could to piss off a poor old lady teacher. It was probably in 5th or 6th grade. We taped my recorder under a chair. She was almost crying. I still have that recording and a guilty conscience. I'm a teacher now, and I can't even begin to imagine how she must have felt.
 
ido1957 said:
Yeah these open ended questions belong in Prime Time or the Cave where you can yammer on about them. This has nothing helpful for newbs either.
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That depends, Ido. Granted, some of them are for Prime time and if you look in prime time or the songwriters forum, you'll see most of them there.
But as I've reiterated a few times now and to you in particular on at least two occasions, some are in part also deliberately intended for newbies {either to recording or to the site} who find themselves on a new forum, not knowing anyone, as a way to get involved, get to perhaps swap opinions with established members and generally ease their way in. After all, for all the years I've been here, there have been numerous complaints about people who bounce in, ask a question and are never heard from/of again.
I'm not pretending that some of these alone solve the problem, but I'd rather at least try and welcome newcomers instead of just grizzling endlessly about it and them.
I actually do believe in treating people how I'd like to be treated.
Two last things; no one holds a gun to your head forcing you to participate in a thread. I look into threads and if I have nothing useful {or even useless :D or humorous } to add or if the subject doesn't float my boat, I simply ignore it and don't get involved. And secondly, I do keep the newbie threads music or recording related. If the threads die a death, they die a death. I start them, I don't direct or own them.
 
ido1957 said:
This has nothing helpful for newbs either.
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Given that you're neither a newb or a representative of the newbie union, I'm fascinated to know a]how you know what someone else may or may not find useful and b]how you could conclude that after only Mr Clean had, at the time you posted, answered in the affirmative.
 
Nah, I don't remember what I had for dinner last night.
Depends on what you mean by "recording". My parents recorded me a lot when I was studying classical piano and playing at recitals. Had a Realistic stereo cassette with dual external mics. My dad died while I was here in NC and I couldn't get enough time/money/thoughts together to go get the recordings and now they're gone forever...:spank:
 
LOL - A newb who never recorded will probably never find any value knowing I recorded my first song on a cassette player. But go ahead and keep posting these threads if you like. My opinion is as valid as the original thread title.
 
I can certainly see how a thread about when us old folks were noobs might be interesting if not particularly helpful for today's budding recordists.

I can't say for sure what my first recording was. I kind of jumped into recording myself right away when I started making music, mostly because I wasn't particularly interested in "soloist" type music, but didn't actually have anybody else to play with. (Don't cry for me)

We had a strange sort of noise punk thing happening with a Roland Juno 6 set up to make absurd low frequency rumbles and accidental percusive clicks and thumps and I'd play one finger "chords" on a guitar through the same Airline guitar amp that the "vocal" mic went through and record that via the microphone on a cheap cassette recorder that I'd had since I was a kid. This of course sounded horrible, but it was kind of supposed to.

I also started very early recording to a cassette deck and then overdubbing by bouncing to a second deck pretty much right away, too. This would have been more "serious" attempts at a pretty standard rock arrangements inspired by the likes of AC/DC and GNR with carefully worked out drum machine parts, bass, guitars, and vocals. The songs themselves weren't even good, but the overall production was surprisingly decent. It had all of the problems of multiple generations of cassette noise and loss of clarity and wasn't anywhere near "pro" quality, but this way of recording really requires a strong vision from the very beginning, an idea of how later tracks are going to fit in with the earlier that I seem to have been pretty good at from the very beginning.

Can't tell you which actually happened first, but it was all quickly replaced by a "proper" 4-track cassette machine within months. I think I still have some of those cassettes around somewhere, but I don't have anything to play them on.
 
First recording I did with a Radio Shack mic and sound blaster live? Well, I have it somewhere, but not online. I do have something from around that time (senior year of hs, 2004-2005) online, a shitty recording of me playing a shitty drum solo: SoundClick artist: Jesting Nul - Composer, lyricist, drummer, keyboardist, bassist, and producer who creates epic productions out of

First recording I did with my "real" studio, same thing, think the original recording is on my studio PC, but the oldest thing I have online was recorded when I literally had one mic, a Rode NT2-a. about March 2007: SoundClick artist: JSR - page with MP3 music downloads
 
ido1957 said:
A newb who never recorded will probably never find any value knowing I recorded my first song on a cassette player.
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Quite possibly. There again, none of us know that so it's kind of irrelevant.
ido1957 said:
But go ahead and keep posting these threads
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As they come up in my head, that I shall. Contributors will ultimately decide whether they move or grind to a halt.
ido1957 said:
My opinion is as valid as the original thread title.
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Agreed.
Now we've got the dancing and formalities out of the way, can you recall your first recordings ?
 
The point that I think all this "uphill both ways" stuff makes to the newbs on this particular forum is that, yes, many of us started out in pretty crappy circumstances and so did most of your favorite engineers. All I had was a cassette deck. Maybe all you've got is your big sister's hand-me-down iPhone with the cracked screen, but you can make something, and if you do your damnedest to make that the best it possibly can be, you will learn more and ultimately be better than if you just buy the kit from Sweetwater and do exactly what some asshole on the homerecording.com forum told you to do.
 
My first recording was on my dad's reel-to-reel when I was about fifteen.

I made up a little sequence on guitar, which I couldn't play. I didn't know any chords or anything, I just found some notes that sounded ok together, and then made up some words to go with it.

It was crap, but I had fun.
 
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