Youth in Lo-fi
Recording for me didn’t start when I had a band or even when I started playing an instrument. The reels began rolling around nine years old when I was recording my younger brother’s comedy routine on a little stereo tape deck using our radio and a Roland synthesizer for little interludes between “sets”. It was stylized very much like a morning radio show, with my brother acting as the snappy talkative host whereas my job was to create as many absurd character voices for him to interact with. Probably not the most professional environment to start a career path, but I wouldn’t change that for the world.
As technology advanced during the turn of the century and my interests included music production, I advanced to some simple MIDI sequencing programs. I spent hours of my teenage years composing tracks filling dozens of compact discs with electronic pieces ranging from Eurodance and Big Beat-inspired tunes to techno-house cuts to unlistenable noise as I was testing my limits on the software. When I started playing in bands in 2001, I would continue to build songs in the digital sequencer before tabulating them to show my bandmates.
On my sixteenth birthday, my dad’s cousin recommended gear for a beginner recording setup to my parents. He was a worship leader in Texas and had a little recording set up at his home and had heard about me recording my guitar through one of those plastic gooseneck microphones. My parents gifted me a small Behringer mixer, 2 AKG D9000 dynamic cardioid microphones, and Cakewalk. I was ecstatic and spent every minute of spare time on my first real DAW, figuring it’s ins and outs and playing with every effect on the program.
After the concert that I detailed in my last blog, my band really wanted to start recording our demo. We were constantly writing and practicing and we probably had about an hour of material we wanted to get on tape. We were a three piece: vocals (Joe), drums (Craig), and guitar (myself). The only thing we needed were drum mics, so we saved up some money together and bought a Nady drum mic package.
I remember at the time very unsure of how to mic up a drum kit. In the church I was attending, the main worship service had an electronic kit and the youth service had an acoustic kit, but mics were definitely not necessary in the smaller sanctuary with a hard-hitting teen drummer. There wasn’t really much information online before Google about recording and the one book I found in the library was more of a dated resource on what to do with a demo after it was recorded and mixed.
However, the Nady mic package looked pretty straight-forward. The shell mics were pretty easy to figure out what they were made to capture, but I hadn’t ever worked with anything like the pencil condenser microphones that came in the set. I remember wondering how to record all four of Craig’s cymbals with only two microphones... I had never seen an overhead pair setup, so I thought I was short a couple mics. Craig and I spent several band practices playing around with the mics trying to figure out how to record with them.
Unfortunately, we never got to start seriously recording before the band parted ways. But that didn’t stop me from recording and experimenting. Only a couple years after this I would be recording music in a professional studio school with millions of dollars in equipment. Looking back on all that, I miss working in my bedroom crafting with whatever I could find. In the end it really isn’t about the equipment you record on; if there isn’t any passion in the music, what are you really recording?
What was your first recording setup? I want to know!
