Things have been pretty quiet for me since the new year began due to various home duties and other items. In truth, I've barely even picked up a guitar or turned on my Pro Tools rack. Perhaps I needed more of a break? A little bit, I guess. First, there was the tennis tournament which basically took up an entire weekend, then there were home items to check off, a birthday, and lo and behold...now it's March. I've also not been feeling well again with my recurring mystery 'illness' and so finding any motivation is rather difficult. The gears in my head have been turning, though, and many mental notes have been made, which isn't completely bad in itself.
Strangely, my mind drifted this morning to the Screaming Blue Messiahs, a band that I liked quite a bit back in the mid to late 80's. I remembered that the very first recording that I ever made in my life was an attempt at covering "Wall of Shame" off of their "Totally Religious" album, the last that they ever made. I had recently acquired my very first recorder which was a 4 track Tascam cassette multitracker, the very bottom of the barrel, probably right around $300 at the time. I believe my parents had purchased it for me as a graduation present from high school. My parents were not particularly supportive of me in musical endeavors (more often than not, they'd yell at me about it) but every once in awhile they'd float the other way and buy a piece of gear that I couldn't otherwise possibly afford. Of course, I didn't really know how to use this thing and I was pretty much on my own to figure it out.
These multitrackers were beyond awful. They basically allowed you to record 4 separate tracks, overdubbed if you will, and it divided a standard cassette tape into 4 quadrants accordingly playing in only one direction (if you flipped it over and played it, it would play in reverse, just like running a turntable backwards). I remember laying down a very bad guitar part miked through most likely a Peavey practice amp at the time, and then a terrible sounding vocal using a beyond awful $50 Peavey vocal mic which I actually still have in my possession, as a sort of bad memento. I remember listening to it back that first time and feeling beyond disheartened, and thus began my endless search, still going to this day, of 'how do you make this sound good/better'? It was in that instant that I learned a) you can't use bad mic's, bad recorders, etc. and b) you can't record and playback music dry without effects. Strangely, bad guitar playing wasn't that high on my agenda for fixing ;) It all added up to one thing in my mind: money, of which I had none, and hence a lifelong pursuit started down an endless journey.
It's strange that I haven't thought of or remembered that this was my very first recording in probably over 30 years. Odd. I may even have the recording somewhere in my old cassette files, although I'd have no way of playing it now since I no longer have that multitracking unit (on a standard cassette deck, it'll only play half the track). Of course, why I'd actually want to hear this is beyond me. By all rights, if it does still exist somewhere, it should be burned.
That's all for now. I'll hopefully have some actual news in the near future since I'm way overdue for it.
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