stupid stuff you did in high school

[curtiswyant]

man, I'm listening to some of this stuff I made in high school (about five years ago) and it's so much fun. A couple kids with a few SM57s, a Mackie board, a DAW and a million pirated plugs can be a dangerous thing! The sound quality really isn't that bad. What I love is how we abused every rock 'n' roll clich? that we thought was SOOOO cool. Like the band-passed intro (then into FULL ROCK!), "weird" percussion, super-hard-panned layered distorted guitars. We were really into Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins. My favorite is the extended Kurt Cobain-esque scream outro over a wall of ringy distorted guitars. Classic! Also, ya gotta love that brand-new wah pedal that I saved up forever to get. Why buy it if you're not gonna use it? Also we used all the crazy effects on vocals, distortion, phaser, flanger, you name it. Letting your friend play bass on track that he's never heard...he'll just pick it up as he goes along. How about the ending every CD with a sappy "acoustic" version of your best rock ballad? You'd never think we could make a full-length CD out of two songs, but we did! Everyone needs an "extra bass" remix for their system in their car, right? Oh and drop D...we loved drop D. Wow...

[DrummerMan]

, a Mackie board, a DAW and a million pirated plugs can be a dangerous thing! The sound quality really isn't that bad.

Funny to think of this as ever being considered "limiting" during one's high school years. Makes me feel a bit old.

For me, the creme dela creme was recording an instrumental version of "Red Barchetta" on a Tascam cassette 4 track. Instrumental because, of course, none of us could sing like Mr.Lee. I think I still have a mix of that. I don't even know what mics were used. Probably some Audio Technica battery powered omnis that belonged to the school that I had access to because I worked at the library and knew where in there they kept those for recording recitals/concerts/etc.. I wonder if I recorded the bass direct... and what about the guitar?? hmmm, I really have no idea.... that seems like a long time ago.

[;ivlunsdystf]

I want to hear that recording, curtis, after such a vivid description. Please up it to rapidshare or some such! If you do, I will reciprocate with some high school weirdness of my own. I was in high school a long time ago though. 8-track reels and a fostex board, no plugs, just a Midiverb II and a rack sonic maximizer. SWEEET

[desdinova]

I worked at a music store in HS, so I copped a sunn 16 channel for cheap. It was ugly and beat but actually didn't sound too bad, no dead channels, either.
Me and some guys from another job I had formed a band, we got to play in a huge (commercial trucking) garage that one of our regular customers didn't use. We played shitty rock/metal, with synth noodling. Never had enough mics, no monitoring. We recorded to an ancient pioneer single-well racked cassette recorder.
Everything was going well until I miss a practice and they plug the outs of the mixer into my old peavey bass head and blew it out. D:

I catch up with the guitarist once in a while, he still uses the B&W G3 multitrack rig I built for him. We keep saying we should get together again for real, but you know how it is.

[JGriffin]

yeah, we woulda KILLED for a Mackie board and DAW in college.

[rwc]

i recall jacking my neighbor's wifi with a cantenna so i could download porn.

[Jay Reynolds]

My first adventure into multi-track:
Sax>SM57>HiZ to LowZ adapter>Digitech Sampling Delay>Tape Deck.
I forget which brand deck it was, but it had 1/4 ins and separate pots for left and right input gain. I'd get a 1 bar phrase going (the delay only had 2 seconds of sampling time) and then mute it. Hit record, unmute the loop, and then play over the loop. Sometimes I'd sample one note with a fast delay and then crank down the time to create a cool sounding drone.
Also, I sold acid. That was really stupid.

[Pgraf]

this was about 3-4 years ago i saved up for a audix d-pack once i got it, i borrowed my cousins Carvin 500 watt p.a.(6 ins?) head ran the stereo outs of it in to the 1/8th inch in of my computer in to garage band, used some kind of cheap akg dynamic as an over head, man we thought it sounded good. we even added a really cheezy megaphone effect to the vocals at one part of the song. "We were gonna be so big."

[RefD]

back in high school (mid-1980s for me) i bought my first 4-track and proceeded to fill a tape with EH Muff Fuzz guitar "orchestras".

after that i did a tape full of the acoustic guitar version done with my late, lamented Yamaha FG-110 and a Realistic PZM taped to my bedroom door...however, many of those turned into proper songs.

the next tape was all Telecaster noodles played over DDL repeat/hold button loops of random thumping on the table as the "drum track" and my late, lamented SCi Six Trak doing keys and bass.

i dunno if i'm sad or happy that i can't find those tapes.

[dave watkins]

way way back in 2003 during my senior of high school, i used a borrowed sm 58 going thru a dukane rackmount mixer striaght into my parents computers sound card into a demo version of cakewalk sonar 3 (so i could add tons of reverb to my acoustic guitars) to record my first um "album". seeing how it was the demo version of sonar it wouldn't let you save the files as wavs, so i would play the reverb drenched tracks in sonar whilst recording them in microsoft sound recorder, so that i could save them as wav files and put them on cd.

i made twenty copies for the first run, did my own artwork too! and sold them all during lunch the following day at school for five dollars a pop. which most people paid in ones and i remember being totally stoked that i could not close my wallet by the end of the day.

best part is i continued to sell them at open mic nights throughout the summer and made enough cash to buy the full version of sonar, an sm 57 and a crappy behringer mixer so i could continue making cheapass recordings.

another moment of accidental brilliance was when me and a few freinds were playing around with a 4 track portastudio and realized that if we cranked the gain way up and recorded acoustic guitar it would sound like neutral milk hotel.

[Judas Jetski]

Two mono portable Radio Shack cassette players, one with a condensor mic. Record drums, bass and guitar to the one, switch the tape to the other machine, play it back into the condensor mic while leaning in and screaming vocals. Use K-mart tapes, the ones with the red labels.

[Scodiddly]

Two mono portable Radio Shack cassette players, one with a condensor mic. Record drums, bass and guitar to the one, switch the tape to the other machine, play it back into the condensor mic while leaning in and screaming vocals. Use K-mart tapes, the ones with the red labels.

I can't top that - I had two stereo cassette decks (home stereo stuff) and an old tube DuKane mixer. Plus an old stereo 1/4" open reel deck, more home stuff but I could make tape loops with it. I'd bounce back and forth between cassettes, add weird stuff in between, etc. Half my "studio" was crap I'd built or modified myself, mostly out of junk from the flea market or local university salvage yard.

[RefD]

Two mono portable Radio Shack cassette players, one with a condensor mic. Record drums, bass and guitar to the one, switch the tape to the other machine, play it back into the condensor mic while leaning in and screaming vocals. Use K-mart tapes, the ones with the red labels.

I can't top that - I had two stereo cassette decks (home stereo stuff) and an old tube DuKane mixer. Plus an old stereo 1/4" open reel deck, more home stuff but I could make tape loops with it. I'd bounce back and forth between cassettes, add weird stuff in between, etc. Half my "studio" was crap I'd built or modified myself, mostly out of junk from the flea market or local university salvage yard.

i started out in the early 80s doing the two cassette deck bounce trick thru a crapola Radio Schlock mixer, but this thread was about high school and i'd moved on to 4-track cassette by then...i wish i'd started on RTR!

bass guitar thru a Small Stone into the hissy mic pre was an early staple.

[???????]

When I was 13 I got a Digitech RP-1 multi-effects that had a headphone out. I had a dual-cassette deck with a microphone input. I took two broken pairs of headphones and cut their 1/8" cords off and soldered them together with my dad's enormous soldering gun and some enormous plumber's acid-core solder (ha!)

Then I plugged my RP-1 into the tape deck's microphone input, and plugged my guitar into the RP-1 and rocked out. Then I had a second tape deck with a built-in electret condenser microphone. I would turn up the stereo with the direct-recorded track, and plug my guitar into an amp, and play along with the track while recording both onto the second deck via the electret microphone.

Sometimes I could then add a third track by taking the tape out, and putting it back into the first cassette deck, and playing along with it again and recording it on another cassette. But the quality would start to suffer quickly.

[curtiswyant]

What about trying to record practice when we practiced in the basement and my buddy's computer was upstairs? It was shoehorned into some fancy IKEA desk so there we were with the tower ripped halfway out with the world's longest RCA cable running from the mixer downstairs to the line in on his PC. The cable was really about ten smaller cables with a million Radio Shack adapters in between. It was lots of fun tracking down bad connections. Someone had to run upstairs to hit stop/record every time.

And the fussy old neighbors were always calling the cops. We went outside and determined it was the bass guitar. Everyone hated the bass player so we made him turn way down 'til no one could hear him. He was an asshole anyway...