From the Archvies: Better Bass & Stereo Recording

The 4th track I have uploaded to YouTube is one inspired by a 1967 song by The American Breed titled "Bend Me Shape Me." It's particularly influenced by the verse part of the song. The instruments used in it are the Casio PT-1, rubber band bass, can drums and some seed pods as shakers. I never titled this recording either but for the sake of the uploads and these blog posts I'm calling this one "Bending Shaping".

You'll notice a few things different about this recording vs. the previous three. First, the bass is a lot more definitive and powerful. Second, the recording is in stereo.

I mentioned needing to find a way to get a better bass sound from my rubber band checkers tin instrument. Well, what I did was take a speaker that I had from somewhere and attached a 1/8" phono plug to it. I had no proper tools at the time so every connection ever made was shoddy and dodgy and led to intermittent and crackly operation. I still have this speaker in a box in the garage and I need to pull it out to take photos. But this is what I used. I would take the speaker and attached it to the back of the tin via the rubber bands and it would stay in place. The phono plug end would go directly into the mic jacks on whatever device I was using to record. I say 'whatever' because by this point I had purchased a small home stereo system complete with AM/FM radio, a single cassette deck and a record player. Perhaps more importantly, this system had two jacks for left and right microphones which leads to my next point.

The ability to record in stereo was very important to me after noticing so many of those hard-panned stereo recordings of the 1960s. I loved that the songs were mixed with bass and drums on one speaker while guitars and keyboards were on the other. Or sometimes bass guitar was on one side and drums were on the other. At other times many of the vocals were isolated on one side so I could choose to listen only to the instruments. I thought that was fantastic. So I wanted to do the same. This particular recording of mine was in stereo with the bass instrument and drums on the right and the keyboard and seed pods on the left.

Sometime around 8th and 9th grade I purchased the aforementioned stereo system. Probably closer to 9th grade. As mentioned, this system had a single cassette deck so I was not able to do overdubs on it. I still had to use my sister's boombox. So what I would do is record a couple tracks using her boombox and then play those back with a mic right at one of the speakers and play something live into the other mic and record all that into my new system. Of course, I would make sure that whatever I was playing live was some physical distance away from what was playing on her boombox in order to avoid microphone bleed. I wanted as much stereo separation as possible. But I was also limited by how long my mic cables were and how loud I could play anything there.

I'm pretty sure that "Bending Shaping" was a 3 track recording. I believe the first track was the drums, second was bass and third was the Casio PT-1 and seed pods simultaneously. The Casio had the ability to record anything you played on its keys. I would put it on the record mode and then play it back via the memory play button. One thing I discovered on my own--this wasn't even in the manual--if I pressed one of the small colored buttons before the memory play button, what I had recorded would play back 4 whole times. I don't remember which button caused this but it was a great discovery to me. It allowed me to have the keyboard play by itself while I played something live at the same time. Thus, in essence I could record overdubbed tracks playing back from the boombox, the Casio playing by itself and anything I wanted to play live all at the same time. However, that would require some nearly precise timing and sync on the part of the overdubbed tracks and the Casio; needless to say I didn't do that very often.

From this point on, many if not most of my archive recordings will feature the new bass sound and a stereo soundscape. I continued to dabble in mono recordings, however due to the fact that my sister's boombox offered portability which meant I could record anywhere. My new system with the stereo mic inputs stayed in its designated place most of the time and I moved it only when I intended to do serious recording. And there was an anomaly with this new stereo system--the cassette player seemed to operate at a slightly higher speed than normal so anything I recorded on it and played back somewhere else sounded slower. That would make for terrible pitch matching depending on the order things were recorded.

So that's the story behind this particular recording and some of the 'advancements' made during that time. Those were highly experimental days.