PTravel
Senior Senior Member
Okay, two "firsts":
When I was working on my doctorate in theater, one of the professors in the theater department asked me to see if I could do anything with the score from an 18th century French farce called "An Italian Straw Hat." My entire music education consisted of two years of piano lessons beginning when I was 8, but the professor knew that I plunked around on the piano. The score, such as it was, consisted of the melody line -- not charts, just melody and lyrics -- for 10 or 12 songs of between 8 and 12 bars each. I used the melody lines, extrapolated on them, wrote additional lyrics and music, and wound up with a full musical score (piano, only) with complete vocal arrangements. This was the first time I ever tried writing vocal harmonies, and also the first time I did musical direction for a show. I recorded the cast performing the score with a Radio Shack stereo cassette deck and a pair of cheapie Radio Shack condenser mikes. It turned out well enough that I started writing my own musicals. This was, if I recall correctly, 1978. That cassette tape has long been lost, but I'd give a lot to be able to hear it again.
The second first was after I came to Los Angeles around 1979. Back then, everyone had answering machines and most of them used cassette tapes for both the incoming and outgoing messages. For some reason, I thought that my friends would enjoy "clever" answering machine messages. The first one that I did was a parody of the Star Trek theme (the original one, from the television show). I had no recording equipment of any kind, except that Radio Shack cassette deck and the two cheapie mikes. I needed an echo effect, so I bought an old 3M reel-to-reel mono tape recorder from a thrift shop for 5 dollars. I manually mounted a second playback head after the machine's record/playback head and wired it into the tape recorder's pre-amp so that I could loop a delayed signal from the tape back to the record head. This crude device produced a reasonable echo effect. This was the first time I used FX in a recording.
Then along came personal computers and MIDI and everything else is (very, very expensive) history.
When I was working on my doctorate in theater, one of the professors in the theater department asked me to see if I could do anything with the score from an 18th century French farce called "An Italian Straw Hat." My entire music education consisted of two years of piano lessons beginning when I was 8, but the professor knew that I plunked around on the piano. The score, such as it was, consisted of the melody line -- not charts, just melody and lyrics -- for 10 or 12 songs of between 8 and 12 bars each. I used the melody lines, extrapolated on them, wrote additional lyrics and music, and wound up with a full musical score (piano, only) with complete vocal arrangements. This was the first time I ever tried writing vocal harmonies, and also the first time I did musical direction for a show. I recorded the cast performing the score with a Radio Shack stereo cassette deck and a pair of cheapie Radio Shack condenser mikes. It turned out well enough that I started writing my own musicals. This was, if I recall correctly, 1978. That cassette tape has long been lost, but I'd give a lot to be able to hear it again.
The second first was after I came to Los Angeles around 1979. Back then, everyone had answering machines and most of them used cassette tapes for both the incoming and outgoing messages. For some reason, I thought that my friends would enjoy "clever" answering machine messages. The first one that I did was a parody of the Star Trek theme (the original one, from the television show). I had no recording equipment of any kind, except that Radio Shack cassette deck and the two cheapie mikes. I needed an echo effect, so I bought an old 3M reel-to-reel mono tape recorder from a thrift shop for 5 dollars. I manually mounted a second playback head after the machine's record/playback head and wired it into the tape recorder's pre-amp so that I could loop a delayed signal from the tape back to the record head. This crude device produced a reasonable echo effect. This was the first time I used FX in a recording.
Then along came personal computers and MIDI and everything else is (very, very expensive) history.