Recordings From The Archive 1989-2019

We will soon be entering the final quarter of the year and once again the plan is to be as musically active as possible in order to prevent yet another rather inactive year. So to give you some very basic and generalized updates on my plans, I am planning to do a Halloween themed song and work on some Christmas music as well. Would still love to get a whole album of Christmas/holiday/seasonal music out there this year. I might have to be more reasonable and settle for a release that's a mix of original tunes and well-loved public domain ones. In fact, I am planning on recording a cover of that old standard, Jingle Bells.

Other than that I will create as the ideas and creative juices flow. On a more determined note, I have decided to start releasing the low-quality, analog recordings I made many, many years ago with my homemade instruments.

Why have I decided to do this now after all these years? Well, in case you don't know, Daniel Johnston died last week at the age of 58. Also in case you don't know, Johnston was considered an outsider musician who started recording his own original music on cassettes at home and distributing them to his co-workers and such. He started doing this around the age of 18 or 19 and eventually ended up with a recording contract, not so much due to his immense talent but more as a result of Kurt Cobain wearing a t-shirt that featured Johnston's album artwork. Cobain, Eddie Vedder and others have claimed to be influenced by Johnston's music.

The reason I will be releasing my old recordings is not because I think it will be a ticket to getting a recording contract with some label. Absolutely not. I don't want to oversimplify what Johnston did. It wasn't all just handing out cassettes, though he did that with anyone he met. But he also performed live, something I don't do and am not willing to do on a solo basis. He attracted attention with what he did. And there was no YouTube during his days of doing this. But all his recordings are out there now, as low-quality and bad as some of them may be. And that's what I want to do. Just get my recordings out there because otherwise they will live only in my experience and what is that point of that? Many of my recordings are just as low-quality and bad (if not worse) than his. I didn't start singing in my recordings till my late teens and even then they are scant and few. I never really wanted to be a singer at that time. At least not until I acquired a real guitar and started learning it.

The instrumental recordings aren't all that great either--off-tempo, off-key, noisy. But that's what you get when you're working with low-quality microphones, cassette tapes and homemade instruments. And it's not about the quality or the recordings. It's the history of my recording experience and the progression and growth I have made over the last 30 years.

Yes, my first recordings were made thirty years ago and I think this would be a great time to start releasing them. And the great thing is that I have digitized many of what I consider to be the more important recordings and have saved a good deal of the equipment I used to make them.

This is part of my history. I know many will not be interested in this. There has to be an intense curiosity in order to sit through the extremely low-fi sound and very limited musical ability on display. But for anyone who can appreciate someone discovering recording sounds in stereo vs. recording in mono and trying to make the most of what he has this may be a journey to explore.

I revisit these recordings from time to time. Very few others have heard any of them. For the most part and understandably so, no one was particularly impressed with anything they heard from my archives. I think it's the same thing that happens when I make a new recording nowadays. People are overlooking the fact that I did everything on my own and just expect to hear something that sounds radio-ready. They're only looking at the final product and not all the work that went into it. And it's even worse nowadays because people can produce music on computers without even knowing how to play a single musical instrument. And no, computers ARE NOT musical instruments. They're only tools. So these guys don't care if you don't recognize all the work that went into making a recording. All they want is you to appreciate the final product because they're not musicians.Yet I am both a musician and a producer.

I was a bit embarrassed by these recordings for a long, long time. They felt like the really bad pictures a kid draws with crayons when he's growing up. And you don't really want to show anyone those pictures if you even have them still. I kept my recordings and it's not necessarily for any other reason than that I tend to keep everything. Yes, I have hoarding tendencies. But I am glad I kept these.

Unfortunately, I have accidentally recorded over things in the past. The beauty of the cassette is that it has always been the most readily available media for recording something, anything. Its size, its price, its ubiquitousness were all pros when it came to the advocacy of this item. Yet the very fact that it could easily be rerecorded over and get erased were its downfall. And once those sounds were gone they were gone for good.

I'm glad I digitized many of these recordings when I did. Most of the original tapes I used were really cheap, low-quality ones. I didn't use the Sony, Maxell, Memorex or TDK brands. No. It was Certron for the most part and other forgettable names. And the sounds on most of them may be very shaky if not gone completely by now.

So I'll be uploading these recordings to YouTube on my Exit World channel. I considered Soundcloud but they give a fixed number of total minutes to upload your content. Once you reach that limit you have to pay in order to upload more. And I'm not about to pay for that service. So YouTube it is as there are no limits there. Once I upload there I will link to here as I write a post about each upload as long as my memory serves me well. This will definitely help me to become more active here as well.

I realize these uploads may not get any views. I'm prepared for that. It's not really about getting views. If I get them, great! If not, it was always about me putting them out there for me. Daniel Johnston didn't care about how good or bad he sounded. He didn't care about how lo-fi his recordings were. He wasn't worried about getting embarrassed. He just did what he was meant to do and didn't suppress it. And that's what I need to do. Hey, maybe if the people aren't listening to the good music I create perhaps they'll listen to the bad!

Homemade Electric Guitar & Bass

My very first amplifier was a mini-amplifier that I purchased from Radio Shack:

This thing was the first step towards 'electrifying' my homemade stringed instruments. This was way back when. I had this game set made out of round aluminum or some other kind of metal that resembled a pizza pan. On one side was a checkerboard design, on the other was a Chinese checkers game board. The 'pan' opened up and stored all the game pieces inside. In essence, when the pan was opened up I had 2 pans. After I had no one left to play the games with, I decided to find a new use for these aluminum pans.

I had these pretty thick and oversized rubber bands that I put around one of the pans. The size of the rubber bands gave nice low tones when plucked--tones similar to that of other stringed bass instruments. But the tones could only be heard if the pan was placed really close to the ears. And needless to say the tiny amp pictured above was not going to reproduce any low frequency sounds. So I had to explore other possibilities for amplification of that instrument.

But what that amp did turn out to be great for was the other pan, which I also put rubber bands around. But these rubber bands were the more typical thin and smaller type. Not good for bass sounds. But good for tenor type stringed instruments!

So I used an old speaker that I pulled out of a broken radio or something as the pickup or microphone. (I used to save old speakers and parts from old radios or tv's or other things that no longer worked). The good thing about using a speaker was that it would lay flat against the back of the pan and remain held in place by the rubber bands. The rubber bands served a dual purpose--the musical notes and keeping the speaker in place. A typical mic would not cooperate as well.

I had wires going from the speaker to a 1/4" plug on the other end for inserting into the mini amp. And when I turned on the amp, VOILA! I now had the sound of amplified rubber bands! It wasn't very musical and it was difficult to get the right tones. But if there was a recording I wanted to make I would mark the rubber bands just where I had 'fret' them in order to get the proper notes. And if I turned the amp up all the way it really sounded like a distorted guitar.

Here is a little recording I made using that set up. Remember, this is before I actually had any real instruments whatsoever. I had no musical training or any lessons. And the recording itself is very old and originally made on very cheap Certron cassette tapes from the 80s and early 90s. This may be as lo-fi as it gets.




There is my rubber band electric guitar! If I can locate the whereabouts of the pans I will gladly photograph them and post on here to give a better idea visually.

I also want to include a snip of how the bass rubber band instrument sounded:




Very hard to get the correct intonation but for me it was super cool and exciting because I got to experiment with sounds and music!