Depends upon how you want to define "first recording". The very first recording would have been somewhere around 1966 or so. I was on drums with a toy drumset (I don't remember the brand) consisting of a small kick, snare, single crash cymbal, a plastic bloc and, yes, a cowbell. The kit sounded awful, but was really cool for a 6-yr-old. My friend Norm picked something out on a 6-string Spanish guitar that was missing two strings. Our neighbor down the street, an older man who just loved gadgets and Big Boy toys used to record our garbage on a Sony 5" or 7" (I forget) open reel recorder. I'm sure it was quite awful as we knew absolutely nothing about music yet, but we had a blast doing it and playing it back for our parents and neighbors and friends.
The first "serious" (relatively speaking, anyway) attempts were in the mid-to-late 70s, starting first with an original Tascam 4-track Portastudio we borrowed form a friend, but quickly moving to our own Teac 3340a 4-track simulsync R2R,
Pioneer RT1020L stereo R2R, and Teac A500 cassette deck, which we used to record an ARP 2600 analog synth coupled with a Sequential Circuits 800 sequencer and a custom voltage control hookup via a TRS-80 Model 1 microcomputer with a whopping 16K of RAM (!), serial interface controller and 4 floppy drives of some 70k or so per disc storage (I forget now the exact number; something I never thought I'd ever forget
.)
We ran the synth through an Acoustic dual-channel head and 4x10 cab. We had a couple of friends come in with a dark walnut Fender jazz bass (I forget the model) run through an Acoustic mono head and (I think) a single 15" cab, and a standard white on black Telecaster run through an amp/cab which I no longer remember. We mixed and monitored through a Technics SA8500X 4-channel receiver and a set of Utah 12" 3-ways.
What I'd give to have that Technics receiver back again
.
G.
