I took some time yesterday to finish recording my song for this year’s Blockparty competition. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s rap — or more specifically, nerdcore. Nerdcore, isn’t that funny? I was recording songs about computers fifteen years ago (my god — has it really been that long?) for my first “abum”, “She Never Told Me (She Was A Leper)”. Back then it wasn’t called nerdcore — it was just “nerdy”. Funny how sometimes it takes years for labels to catch up with what people are doing.
Back when I recorded Leper, I was using a Fostex four-track recorder. That meant I could record four different, independent tracks, one at a time. For most of the songs I used one track for drums, one track for guitars, one track for bass and one track for vocals. That sure didn’t give me a lot of breathing room. I used a few tricks, like recording guitar solos on the vocal track (when I wasn’t singing) or putting things into the computer to add effects, but everything (especially pc-based recording) was very primitive back then. Don’t get me wrong; some incredible albums have been recorded on four-track recorders (see: The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), but when you’re playing all the instruments yourself, having just a few tracks to work with can be pretty frustrating.
(Click to Enlarge)
Compare that to a picture of Sony’s Acid 6.0 running on my PC today. In this track I ended up using 18 tracks — true, several of them had a lot of wasted space, but my medium-level PC had no problem keeping up with this many tracks so there was no reason to consolidate or be conservative. Somewhere, John and George are rolling over in their graves.
I too used to do the four-track thing – in fact, I still have that four-track boxed up here somewhere. I’m inordinately proud of the old four-track stuff though, even though I too used to “cheat” by bouncing stuff so I could get six tracks out of the deal – it’s kind of a CGI-vs-models thing, I’m really happy with the stuff that was all me, no MIDI, loops or samples. I almost put one of my old 4-track concoctions on PDF 2 to see if anyone would notice the difference, but then I realized that, from tape hiss alone, yeah, everyone would notice the difference. Ah well.
My four-track was a Fostex that advertised 8 tracks. Essentially, it had some sort of internal, automated mechanism for compressing four tracks down to one (“bouncing” and/or “ping-ponging” I think it called it). I did it once or twice and I thought the manual was a little misleading. The option should have been called, “make what you’ve recorded so far sound like a muddy mess.”
I bought my Fostex four-track recorder used for $200 in 1994, kept and used it off-and-on for five years, and sold it on eBay for $200 in 1999. I have considered buying another one just because I like the physical aspect of recording (twisting knobs and punching buttons) but with all the computer-based recording programs out there today, there’s simply no point in owning one. (For me and my applications, that is — I’m not saying there’s no market at all for them any more!)