With what gear did you make your 1st recording?

  • Thread starter Thread starter RichJ
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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.

Strange times

t
 
tvolhein said:
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.
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"Hello darkness my old friend" indeed! ;) :D.

G.
 
Well My very first recording was on a Sears 3 inch reel to reel 2 speed, in My sisters walk in closet. My first studio. Probably around 65. Being that it was a 2 speed I figured out how they made the chipmunks sound!!
 
dintymoore said:
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...
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Hey Dinty,
My Mom married this guy in 74 great guy. And his Dad was blind but he had these two sony reel to reels with maybe 40 or 50 tapes of the Boston pops symphony orchestra recorded live. People would take Him to see the pops with His recording equip. His Dad died and He gave us the sony's and the tapes. We recorded over all of them with basement rehearsal's. Then when John Lennon was killed my knuckle head pal recorded over all the basement tapes with news clips about John. What goes around comes around!!
 
one of these back around '68 or so-
craig212.jpg

a craig 212. a year or so later i moved up to an rca 5" reel version with 'piano key' type controls.
 
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westgate said:
one of these back around '68 or so-
craig212.jpg

a craig 212. a year or so later i moved up to an rca 5" reel version with 'piano key' type controls.
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...and Mr. Phelps, if you decide to accept this mission you will receive further instructions. This tape will self destruct in 30 seconds.....
 
A $1 usb mic purchased on ebay :rolleyes: One Sunday afternoon I recorded an entire "album" on window's sound recorder that I (of course) promptly distributed to all of my friends... Wow. I still have it the songs and mic too :D I need to and listen to that, btw fun thread.
 
Probably year 2000 or so. Me and a friend had a few too many and tried to write a song to my girlfriend. I played the guitar & sang. We recorded it to one of those mini cassette recorders. I still have it, and it still sucks. But on the plus side, I've been married to that girl for 6 years. Probably because she's never heard that song. :D
 
'64ish I guess messin with my dad on a Sony Sound On Sound' 1/4". Wow. I think it's still under the table over there there.
Remember trying to make a reverb outa some springs. :)
 
Around 1985 I used one of these, a phillips DG6560, can't remember if I had it before the tascam 4 track or after. I think it was before cause I'd record onto the tape then play that part and play along and record that, then swap the tapes over till I had one big pile of hiss. Says it doubled as a guitar amp too that broke my heart after hauling it all the way to rehersals when I was 16 and it couldn't be heard over the drums.
 

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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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Awesome, I also did this and while it sounded terrible, I was stoked that it worked. It was 1995 and I was about 13. All I had was a bass, but I kept adding harmonies.

Soon upgraded to a Fostex 4-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.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
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.
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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.

Cheers,

Otto
 
ofajen said:
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.
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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...

I use a picture of it as a little icon on my "Metering and Gain Staging" applet on the IRN website, but that's a tiny little 16x16 or so image; let me see if I can find normal-sized picture of one on the net.

EDIT: Yeah, here it is. Very strange, they *DO* call this one the MX-5050 also. This is a picture of a "Mk I" version, I've also found a "Mk III" version on the net that is the same basic style. I don't remember a "Mk" number on the one I used, but it was probably an earlier one, if "Mk"'d at all:

otari.gif


G.
 
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If I go back to the very beginning, I was first recorded on an early 70s Phillips cassette deck that belonged to my parents, singing songs for mom. When I was ten I recieved a mono am/fm radio with cassette unit that I used like a science kit. When I recieved a GE 'boom-box' about 3 years later I was already well into reading about The Beatles etc and various overdubbing techniques, so I somehow rigged my two machines into a sound-on-sound arrangement with a few jacks and wires twisted together (after having been doing it the crudest way imaginable - by using the built-in condenser mics and singing along with one while blaring the other!).

That's what I was up to prior to my entry into actual multitrack recording.
 
1965 - a really cheap reel to reel (can't remember what brand) that, as I recall never made it through a complete recording without problems.

1969-70 - Akai Reel to Reel that my buddy's brother brought back from service in Viet Nam. We recorded in his bathroom and convinced ourselves that it sounded as good as any studio we could ever find. I wish I could remember what mic we used.
 
First was just cassette tape recording guitar them playing guitar over it. Then a Tascam 4 track Portastudio...the cheapest one I could find.
 
About a decade ago I purchased a used TASCAM Porta07 4-track cassette recorder. A friend of mine wrote some lyrics based on a comic strip he'd created, and left it to me to put it to music. I don't have the recording anymore, and I don't remember the exact instruments used, or even whether I had a bass guitar at the time. I do remember that the 4-track came with no manual, so I had to figure it out on my own. The most fun thing about the song was that I used the music composition software on the Super NES program "Mario Paint" to create a drum track.
 
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I bought this machine in about 1971 or so. I used it for recording all my records so that I could keep the vinyl in good shape. In about 1975 or so, with the help of a couple of friends, I found that I could use it to record some live music and do sound on sound and sound with sound (mic line mixing). We did a bunch of noisy seven or so generation bounce recordings. I replaced it with a Teac 2300 ----- 3340 ---- 80-8. Then my equipment supplier hired me to work for them and I had to sell everything. :(
 
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