With what gear did you make your 1st recording?

ooooh sting!


I was going to say something about recording on wax cylinders but I wasnt brought up to be so impolite ;)
 
My first attempt was circa 1964 using a cheap old reel to reel a neighborhood kid had. It never worked right and the recording never came out right, but we sure had fun imagining we were in a big recording studio recording a number one hit! :-) Walter
 
Great posts all!
How could I have forgot my older brother's Radio Shack "Stereo Disco Mixer" that we used in the above setup...In some ways I miss that carefree, spontaneity of just creating and recording, without worrying about what softsynth, or VST effect to use.
Rich
 
Harvey Gerst said:
God, suddenly I'm feeling very, very old !!!
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Don't sweat it Harvey, at least you started in the Age of Electricity. It's not like your first recording was in stone Hieroglyphics ;) :D.

As a guy that's about to turn a half-century myself, I do feel with you a bit. I remember that "young" meant some kid who was born after man landed on the Moon. Sh*t, I now have friends born after Tranquility Base that have kids of their own getting music scholarships for college.

It's all relative, though Harv. I was watching Leonard Cohen on stage on TV the other day and the guy at 75 still makes me feel like a slacker.

And time will have it's revenge. Just take pleasure in knowing that the young-uns here today will be reminiscing about the good ol' days when you had to get your hands dirty mixing with ancient digital gear like VST plugs and multitrack editors, and actually use mechanical transucers that actually dealt with old fashioned physical sound waves instead of beaming a spacial holograph right into your cranium via GHz wireless alpha wave converters.

:D

G.
 
Logitech $15 Mic Duct Taped to a Wall in my grandmothers basement using CEP 2.0 battling on Sixshot.com Audio Battles. Aha. I was 15. In The Best Group and top 20 spitters in text battles up till that point. Then I took over goldmic. Now I make REAL music. Not battles
 
circa 1972, Panasonic monophonic cassette recorder w/ built-in condenser mic.



[edit: actually, that was my first music recording. But my very first recording ever was made on a Grundig dictaphone circa 1965.]
 
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December 1982: Roland Juno-6 onto a Nakamichi 482Z. I actually still have both, and they still both work, except that the Nak will only play, not record, due to a failed part that can't be replaced. Of course, I don't want to record with it anymore, just occasionally play back old tapes, so it's cool.

A few months later, in early 1983, I bought a pair of SM-57s, an Otari MX-5050 4-track, some tape and a Roland line mixer and started tinkering with multi-track recording, but the first stuff was just the synth tracks on cassette.

Cheers,

Otto
 
gethypedmusic said:
Damn, you guys have been around for a while hahaha
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I guess still being around beats the alternative, eh? :)

I don't have my first Otari any more :(, but I still have a 1/4" 4-track and I still use it, and it sounds great. In fact, I'm listening to playback on it as I type. :)

Cheers,

Otto
 
Around 1966 or so (I was born in '56) I started on my brother's tiny reel to reel, just making vocal weird sounds.

Around '68 my Mom gave me a cassette tape recorder she got through Texaco and I went nuts with that for about 2 years... I didn't realize you could buy cassette tapes and used the same tape over and over recording piano, drums and fart-like sounds.

In I believe 1970, the band I was in did a direct to disc (it made these see through red records) recording of Santana's "Evil Ways".

After that friends got Sony reel to reels and a 3340... you know the routine...
 
Wow...I think my very first recording was using a cheap computer mic I bought at Walmart. We had vocals, an acoustic guitar, and bongos all tracked at once with the mic. And actually...for what it was...it wasn't half bad. That was probably 12 years ago. :eek:

I've come a long way in that time.
 
About '69 my old man had a portable reel 2 reel but I wasn't allowed near it...
Plugging my bass into the built in stereo cassette player recorder in the family stereo system (wow, we went from a radiogram to a stereo with recording cassette player, FM radio and 3 speed Garad turntable in about '72 such a BIG leap - and HEADPHONES - another world opened up with stereo headphones after years of trannies & an earplug) in 74.
In '76 using the built in auto limited mics of a National portable cassette player (now that was TOP line portable gear) to record songs with best mate: me bass - him 12 string & vox.
'81 used 2 portable cassette players to build tracks solo in the bedroom of a flat.
'86ish Yamaha MT100 4 track with my 1st real mic - a Tandy (Radio Shack) Hi Ball Dynamic.
I didn't go digital until about '98 or so when I ran the stereo out from my 4 track into the inbuilt soundcard of a P2 PC.
Now? Dual core chip with an INCA 8I/8O soundcard but I still use the MT100 to build a foundation - I only got rid of the Hi Ball a couple of years ago when it fell apart.
Harvey - was the Webcor a paper disc recorder? I found a paper disc recorder about 8 years ago but couldn't find, for the life of me, any info about how to get it to work I think I still have it stashed away somewhere at work unless the evil storeroom cleaning elves have dumped it!
 
first it was a couple of these guys:

il_fullxfull43925976.jpg


recording one guitar part and then recording a second guitar part on the other deck while playing the first one back. you could go on and on as long as you didn't mind the original take gradually drowning in hiss.

my first multitrack recorder was one of these:

tascam234.jpg
 
Wow-circa 1968- Recorded on a Gibson ES style guitar with 1 P-90 into a Kustom 200 into a SONY stereo mic (unknown model) into a Revox 4-track reel to reel. Then- nothing until 2002- A Taylor 710CE into a pair of Oktava MC012's into a Joemeek twinQ into a Korg PXSR4 Pandora. I just never looked back.-Richie

Oh yeah- for the record, I wasn't a rich kid. The Revox belonged to my brother, who was a big time bass player in the day.
 
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hansgauffin said:
Back in 1992, I was 9 years old and me and my friend borrowed a Yamaha PSS-570 (i´ve looked that up more recently) and recorded live into a crappy hitachi 2 track cassette recorder. The following years I used another bigger Hitachi ghetto blaster with dual cassette, I recorded onto the first cassette and then overdubbed to the other, playing another instrument, then switched cassettes and kept on doing overdubs, I used to make 5 overdubs or something, and the sound got worse and worse for each track.
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Man, I remember doing this when I was a young teenager. there was so much static by the time I completed something it sounded like I was singing in the rain forest. Then when I was 15, my mom discovered what I was doing and told my grandfather, who took me out to a music store and bought me a Tascam Portastudio 414. When I was 18 I got a used Roland VS 880 (for FREE) which I used exclusively for about 7 years and I recently bought a Roland VS 1824.

Its amazing how much I learned about recording with cassettes tho. and I laugh when I think about the crap I recorded with them! I guess its still crap, but at least now its with 24bit digital clarity!
 
I'm enjoying reading this thread....takes me gack,,,,,,waaaaaay back.

1966, recording to a 1/4" reel to reel. I was playing a Teisco Del Ray guitar and singing....some song. I don't remember the song, but given the time frame, I suspect it was likely an R&B song likely from a Motown artist. Three friends were playing on an old Ludwig drum kit, a Farfisa organ and a bass guitar that I can't remember.

We carried that reel to reel with us everywhere (it had build in speakers and weighed a ton)
 
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