The Song Fight Bulletin Board

You kids don't know how good you've got it. When I started recording songs, we had to use reel-to-reel tape recorders scavenged from your grandpa's hi-fi equipment, and we bounced the tracks back and forth until everything sounded like it was under a pile of winter coats. If you had a Fostex four-track cassette recorder, you were one of the lucky ones! We'd build up entire orchestras one note at a time from monophonic analog synthesizers -- real analog synthesizers with patch cords, not those newfangled digital imitations. Why, I bet you've never even lifted a soldering iron. Dammit, I'm going to go down to the basement and dig up some of my old songs to show you what I mean!

Or if you took a different path, you used MOD file trackers where you built songs out of samples that you usually downloaded from BBSes without knowing what they were from, and had the ability to play up to four of them at the same time.

I still have most of my old MOD files, and they are pretty terrible.

I also have a cassette recording of a piano composition I wrote and performed when I was 7 but I don't have a cassette player and I've never even listened to this recording and I assume it was really bad.

There was something on slashdot the other day about whether MIDI and MOD files are obsolete.

I finallly hooked up my old reel-to-reel, gave it a few drops of oil to get it moving again, and listened to a couple of tapes I made in the early seventies. One is an electronic-music ramble on a borrowed Yamaha CS-50 -- it's pretty wild, that was a heck of a synth -- and the other is supposed to be a demo tape, but actually it's pure embarrassment. I re-recorded it all to digital media anyway.

Maybe I can find something halfway decent from the Fostex X15 Multitracker days. The mixdown tapes are around here somewhere.

wow, slashdot is still around?

Ooh, this makes me want to dig out a tape I made when I was 9 or 10 when me and my friend Cooper spent an afternoon with a tape recorder and wrote a bunch of songs about ducks, Egyptian curses, and Rosie O'Donnell. I'd say the audio quality was bad and that it was super primitive...but I'd be lying cause cheap audio equipment sounded alright by 1999.

Æpplês&vØdkã wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 19, 2019 7:31 pm

Ooh, this makes me want to dig out a tape I made when I was 9 or 10 when me and my friend Cooper spent an afternoon with a tape recorder and wrote a bunch of songs about ducks, Egyptian curses, and Rosie O'Donnell. I'd say the audio quality was bad and that it was super primitive...but I'd be lying cause cheap audio equipment sounded alright by 1999.

I was surprised by the quality of the tapes I spooled up the other day. The ones that didn't involve track bouncing had rich bass and crisp highs; this from ordinary 1/4" tape on a modest home hi-fi deck from Panasonic, after the tape had been sitting around for forty-five years.

Lol. Great thread. I’ll see what I can dig up.

Photo of my old radio studio (but not me at the board).

Now I need to search my old 2 tracks reels from the radio station. The production room was a quasi mix of things - I'd usually have multiple stereo cart machines with pre mix material we'd toss live vocal tracks onto a otari 2 track. and then bounce things using repro onto another otari.

It was back asswards production, but as fast as you could get a mix master done in the 80's in an all analog setup. and most of the things were only a few generations down before the final mix, so not too much background hiss.