I was growing up during the early to middle 1960’s era of the exploding growth of consumer electronics, and as a result, I was exposed to a variety of media playback devices. But back then, they weren’t known collectively as media playback devices. Instead, the devices were called what they were in the minds of people; film projector, tape player, and TV set. My older sisters and brothers were trying out and using these new consumer playback devices, usually transistor radios and sometimes tape players. The devices would last for a short while, and then a new playback device would become available that they would begin to use.
As a result of being around friends and family members who were using these various playback devices, I began to pay more attention to what they were and how they worked. Portable and console radios were a marvel to me at a very young age, and they are still around today. But playback devices that included analog tape as a medium for playback of audio became something of a source of fascination to me. I mean a piece of tape moves inside of the device and I was hearing things. How does that work I wondered? And then, at the age of 14, I got involved in my first real recording session that changed my life in ways that stay with me to this day.
My first real recording session involved a very nice woman who led the small choir at a local church in the town I grew up in on Long Island, New York. It was a home recording studio that a friend of hers had in their home. I was asked by this woman to play some bass guitar parts onto tape, using a tape-recording machine. The tape recorder was new to me, it was the year 1971 and I found myself feeling strangely excited to partake in such an endeavor. The choir leader then asked me to follow along with what I heard on the tape, to follow the rhythm parts that I heard and play my bass to those parts. We had been rehearsing the songs to be recorded beforehand, so I was not faced with learning new material on the spot at the recording date. But it was still my first official recording, and I did well with handling the excitement of hearing my bass guitar part played back to me for the first time. The tape recorder had a feature labeled on the front of it that was an acronym that read SOS, and I asked what that meant. The man who was operating the tape recorder said that the acronym meant “sound on sound”; he went on to say that we can hear what we are recording to tape while simultaneously listening to playback material previously recorded onto other tracks on the tape.
While I had a bit of an idea of what all of that meant, I was bitten by the recording bug in a big way. The recording date turned out very well, the adults were pleased with what I had recorded, and I was pleased that they were. Having had my first recording session be a successful one, I began to wonder what a life in recording might be like. I heard records in a new way after that; as I played along with my bass to my favorite LPs at home, I would imagine myself being the bass player for that recording session. I felt a thrill about the potential of hearing my bass playing being played back for all to hear on a record or tape recording. And while I did not begin recording right away at the age of 14, I knew somehow that my opportunity to do so would emerge at some point. So, I really practiced for many hours on my first bass guitar to make sure that I would be ready when the time came.
As my musical life expanded, I found myself recording with the various school orchestras in my school district and later on, around Long Island. As I remember, the first motion picture films that I saw with me in them were the films taken of the elementary school orchestra that I was in. After the filming session with the orchestra was done, the film editing time did not take very long. The elementary school would then hold an evening assembly some weeks later at the school auditorium that invited all of the parents of the students in the orchestra to attend and to watch the film. But my own musical recording life on the bass began after I had graduated from high school, after the thousands of hours of playing the bass and reading music. All of that practice turned out to be a good thing for my musical recording future.
During my years in the service, while I was stationed in Japan in the late-1970’s I was part of some band recordings that were made by small Japanese production companies when the band played concerts; and separately by a band member who brought his own reel to reel tape recorder to the band’s regular gigs at the club on the installation we were all stationed at. Listening to those band recordings allowed me to hear what I truly sounded like to each audience, and so I continued crafting some ways towards getting a good live sound on the bass. I really liked listening to those recordings, and back in those days having cassette tapes were the way to go. They were relatively easy to carry around, and there were a couple of decent brands that featured 120-minute cassette tapes that were reliable for recording and playback.
After returning to the States, I finally did my first true band recording in southern California in 1982. The band that I was leading was rehearsed and ready to go, or so we thought. What we realized in the studio was that our song parts were exposed when recording. All of the little things become big things while recording in the studio. We had done some ensemble recording to a stereo cassette deck at our rehearsal place with decent results. But the recording studio was different in how the recording process put everyone’s recorded part under a microscope so to speak. And in the end, we did well as a band during that recording session. The resulting cassette tape demos that I made did result in my band getting more gigs later on. I discovered that I was delivering a good tone to the 16 track, 1 inch tape machine used at that recording studio. And knowing how to get a great bass tone in every studio that I had the honor to be in after that became a serious goal of mine.
After I made the move to the Los Angeles area in the mid-1980’s, I was amazed at the many excellent recording studios that I had the privilege to either visit or record in as a bass player. The largest studios in the city were vast indeed; some of them reminded me of walking in a cathedral or a lush and expansive house of worship. And there was a sense of reverence in those big posh studios, I mean the people inside often spoke in hushed tones as to not disturb the recordings taking place in its many recording rooms. They were a special place indeed to be in to record music. My recording abilities on the bass grew expansively during my years of living and recording in Los Angeles. I recorded many demos and some good records for artists while I lived there.
And what playback medium did I record to during all those years? Analog tape, and every studio was using a multi-track recording machine to perform the tasks of recording and playing back all of the recorded material. I dug into the science of how the process worked, how analog tape was made, and much more. I recorded my own demos that I sent out to many music publishers in the early 1990’s using multi track cassette tape recorders. But just when I thought that analog tape was going to be the future medium for multi-track recording, along came digital hard disk recorders along with the computers that began to change the landscape of recording audio everywhere. And that migration over to the digital recording world began to represent an exciting new learning curve for me, one that I decided to take on. And the future did change in the recording world, and I will speak about that change with you as we go forward. In the meantime, do your best at each recording session, and have fun when you do.
