From the Archives: My First Recording Session with Special Guest, Part 1 (1989)

So my last post was about my very first song recording. This post will be about a couple of song recordings I did before that one with the assistance of my brother.

When I discovered the ability to record music via the overdub function of my sister's dual cassette boombox, I thought it would be cool to get some help recording. I quickly realized that the more overdubs you did the worse the overall recording sounded, not to mention the cheap cassettes and microphones I was using. So if I could get someone to record with me that would eliminate the need for twice as many tracks and thus preserve at least some quality.

I used to make deals or bets with my brother and they usually involved him having to record with me if he lost or as a result of some other exchange. In fact, to this day he still owes me several hours of recording even 30 years after the fact. But I came to enjoy recording on my own even if there was a sacrifice in sound quality.

My brother and I had no musical training. We never learned any instruments by this point. And I was thrilled to record stuff while he wasn't really interested. But we did have some sort of deal and at least I got these 2 recordings which I have preserved for all these years.

I can't be certain of the order but I believe both of these songs were recorded as follows:

1st track: drums-me; Casio PT-1-bro
2nd track; bass-me; guitar-bro

Around that time I used to have this huge dry cell batter that I had bought for some home experiments. When I didn't have money to buy AA batteries for the Casio I found a way to wire this dry cell to the AC adapter jack on the keyboard. But it wasn't a solid connection and so you'll hear the keyboard playing intermittently on both recordings.

That little guitar wasn't easy to play either because the way I had set it up to have the strings ring as best they could would not stay in place. My brother had even said that I gave him the bad instruments to play. Truthfully though the ones I played weren't all that great or easy to play either!

I had some idea of what I wanted to play on these songs and I told my brother to play whatever he thought sounded good with what I was doing. I changed the tempo a few times on the first recording just to mix things up a bit. I'm not sure what the inspiration behind the first recording was, but the inspiration behind the second recording was "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" by The Temptations. When you hear the second recording (will be featured on my next blog post) surely you will not detect any trace of that classic song from 1972. But if you listen deep enough you'll see that my drum beat was similar to the single bass drum beat of Papa, and my 'bass' playing was also a repetitive 3-note line. And on this recording I also used something to ride like a hi-hat cymbal. So the beat was definitely lifted from that song. The bass line was different but similarly repetitive. And as far as what my brother played, well, he wasn't into the same kind of music I was so he just played whatever on the guitar and keyboard to fulfill his part of our deal.

So these were my very first recordings along with the one I did by myself from the previous post. Some time after this I would get my very own stereo system--nothing terribly expensive with a single cassette recorder and 2 microphone inputs. The 2 inputs allowed me to start recording in stereo which was in those days a dream come true for me. Not only that but I also started experimenting with using other devices instead of those voice-tuned microphones in order to get better recorded sounds, particularly in my attempt to get better bass sounds from my rubber bands!