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Musical endeavors have been a main feature of my life for about 11 years now. When I was 14 I started playing Guitar after being influenced by Nirvana. Soon I was singing (horribly) and recording my own stuff.
How I did it:
It started with me only singing falsetto (I wasn't sure how else to do it) and recording with a very basic setup. I would go from my guitar amp directly into a karaoke machine. I recorded it on Deck B, and then I would switch the tape into Deck A and listen to it, whilst I recorded a new track (along with the previous recording) onto the tape in Deck B. This method was a crude version of "Bouncing", something even used by the Beatles. Read more about tape bouncing here: Article on Bouncing
I sometimes used a radioshack mixer for monitoring and its nice delay (actually it was crappy, but I could move the knob around and get all sorts of weird effects). I recorded vocals into a semi-functioning microphone held together with Duct Tape. Not sure what brand, but I dont think it mattered at this point. The pictures below show my setup from those days (circa nov 1996):
Eventually, I migrated to a better karaoke machine, and got the chance to use a friend's equipment to record stuff for the "Eclectus" projects. It was a zoom 505 guitar pedal and a Dr. Rythym Drum machine. Some interesting ideas were forged with this setup, but it was still very hard to come up with good sounds, and it was still very hard to bounce back and forth from tape to tape (the sound degrated very much after 2 generations).
Then came computers.
My mom had given me a 233 mhz pentium II Computer with a 6 GB hard drive and 32 megs of RAM. One day I figured out how to record into it, using windows sound recorder, and used all of the effects available to me in that program, such as reverse, reverb, and fade in and out. I recorded a really interesting piece, but lost it, due to system failure, and CD burners hadn't come out yet. I struggled recording music with this computer for a couple of years after this. I could get about 4 simultaneous tracks running concurrently, and used the digital version of bouncing to keep things simple and light on the processor. Even so, eventually it became impossible to record even ONE track without dropouts, or clicks, or whatever you may call it.
After getting some temp work on Long Island, I made enough money to get some much needed equipment. Too bad I got the wrong stuff. The only enduring purchase I made was a Nady SCM-900 microphone and a Behringer mixer (both still alive today). I also bought a Behringer Virtualizer and a Boss Dr. Groove drum machine, which soon became very obsolete to me.
Then I got an insurance settlement.
The first thing I did was buy the best computer I could find. Of course, this was 2001, and the best I could find was a Pentium 4 1.7ghz. I still have this computer and used it for my music up until 2007. Something shorted out and it simply did not come back on... Being a bit old in the tooth anyway, i got rid of it. Here it the computer that i had for 4 or 5 years:
This computer was responsible for recording my 1st album, as well as many other projects in the interem for my next albums. It certainly played a big part in my music production. I used an emu1820m interface with it, which worked awesome at the time. I also started acquiring better software, such as REAPER (see the banner at the bottom of the page) and the BFD drum workstation, which really improved my drum sound. However, after it died, and i moved back to Honesdale, PA, i had to use my laptop exclusively for my productions:
(picture coming)
This laptop is a Athlon XP 2600, with a 40 gb hard drive. There were alot of limitations with this setup. Although it was faster in processor speed than my last setup, it had decreased throughput due to the single, small and slow hard drive. This excluded many of my samples, such as BFD and various others, and also it decreased the number of tracks i could record and playback at the same time. But i made due, and recorded many coversongs as practice for when i got a better rig. I also recorded the phase 1 stage of Steve Faubel's music, which consisted mostly of just acoustic guitar, piano, and vocals. We did this within the temporal confines of about two weeks. The presonus firepod was quite capable and compatible with this setup and worked flawlessly. That is, when the wireless internet was shut off.
To be continued...
