"Hello darkness my old friend" indeed! .Around 1964, "Sounds of Silence" on a Concord wire recorder. A friend of mine and I did a spoof of the song. It was in my bedroom which I had painted black, all of it, even the window pane.
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...
one of these back around '68 or so-
a craig 212. a year or so later i moved up to an rca 5" reel version with 'piano key' type controls.
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.
I have done some work with the pedestal- mounted 8-track version of that Otari. Funny, for many years now I would have sworn that was called the MX-5050 as well, but that's obviously not right. I'll have to look that up...
But yeah, that Otari was a nice machine with a good sound.
G.
No, this wasn't a 1" machine, but it was a console-style (tape laying almost horizontal) 1/2" machine on a pedestal with a built-in meter bridge overhead. It's funny, for some 10 years now I've had it in my head that that thing was an MX-5050. I'll kick myself if I had the model number wrong in my head all these years...Are you thinking of the MX-70? That had meters on the front panel and a 1" transport, with either 8 or 16 tracks. There was also an 8 channel version of the MX-5050 like I had, where the electronics unit was just a bit taller to house all 8 channels.