With what gear did you make your 1st recording?

  • Thread starter Thread starter RichJ
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I used to record my friend and I (he played guitar. I didn't !) when we were 14 on a cassette recorder. This was in '77.
A few years later, I used a Hitachi tape deck or another friend's Sharp ghetto blaster to record our jams. But before this one of the guys did sound on sound recording with that Hitachi to overdub lead guitar onto our basic guitar and bass. He was in love and wanted to do some tunes for his intended. When we had been at school, he was the feared school mauler but marijuana and age had mellowed him beyond all recognition. But I hated those sessions, 5 days of headache. I couldn't listen to it. This was summer '82. I've never heard them except one little piece of lead guitar.
In terms of multitracking, I started off with a Fostex X-15 4 track portastudio but my imagination was too much for what it could handle and after one particular tune had descended into a pile of hiss and indistinct mush, I went up to 8 track, a Tascam 488.
 
Made my first recording on a Zoom MRS4B 4 tracks recorder using an sm58 clone and fishman guitar pick up.
 
My first recording was into an Akai two track reel to reel that my dad owned. Using a Realistic (radio shack) mic into the right channel i recorded a crappy $300 drum kit. I only had a desktop mic stand that would elevate the mic like 6 inches so i placed it on the floor where it was almost underneath the snare to capture some snare, hi hat, and as much kick as possible. Then recorded an electric guitar direct into the left channel.
It was awful.
And now when i get frustrated cause i'm not getting a sound or a mix that i like, i think back to that crappy old recording and feel a little better... sort of.
 
About 1969 or 1970 a band I was in recorded Santana's "Evil Ways" at a guy's house. He did a straight to record recording. The recorder was a small box sort of like a record player, but you plugged in a mic and it cut the recording on to small (45 rpm size maybe) record. The records were red, semi-see through plastic and bendy like thin cardboard.

I would love to know what that recorder was and even more love to hear that recording.
 
A Ross 4-track back in '85. Sounded terrible, but as I learned I made the most of it and by the time I traded it in I was getting somewhat decent recordings out of it for what it was. Crappy.
 
Cutec 4 track cassette (anybody remember those?) and an SM57. Didn't sound too bad for a cassette.
 
I took a music synthesis class in college about 1978, and the lab featured an Ampex 8 track and a couple of Arp synths. We had to record a 'switched-on' piece and an original composition on the for the final grade. I was hooked.
 
hmmm... when I was 5 years old...

I used a tape recorder to make my own radio talkshow when I was five. I would make a tape of songs from casey cassum's top 40 show by holding an old radio up to the built in mic on a tape recorder, then I would record myself in between songs being a talkshow host/announcer and speaking in funny voices as my 'guest'. I was a pretty lonely kid I guess.

as far as REAL recordings go, I got hit by a car when I was 14 and riding my bike. minor bumps and bruises but the lady paid for the ER visit and gave me $500 dollars, which went right into my first Fostex 4 track. I don't even remember the model number but it was old and crusty and I loved it, and recorded my basement band using a drum machine I got for christmas (the origional boss doctor rhythm - because we didnt know how to mic the drums) and some radio-shack 10 dollar mic for the vocal, and just direct lined my guitar right out of my distortion pedal and the bass player... this stuff sounded HORRIBLE and muddy and we had no concept of frequencies or anything like that, or tape saturation, we were just figuring it out as we went along. I still have those tapes. Funny memory, the bass player thought that because he was playing a bass, that we should turn up the 'bass' on the equalizer, so we figured, by 14 yr old reasoning, that we should probably turn up the treble for the singer. All-or-nothing equalizing. oh dear oh dear.
 
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