Your First Recording Unit

[Devlars]

Ahh the beloved Teac 144 it served me well. Still works great actually but I've moved on to other devices.




Anyone else care to reminisce a bit? What was your first recording unit? Pics are a good thing.

[theposterkid]

First recording unit? A cassette boombox to record things like baseball games off the TV.

From there, in my 7th grade year I moved up to a Talkboy (featured in Home Alone 2) in an attempt to record on-field action for the local high school football team (I was the waterboy, but wanted to record while out there on the field).

<img src="http://i17.ebayimg.com/02/i/02/92/6d/54_1_b.JPG">



In 9th grade, I was at Guitar Center and randomly saw a Tascam 414 4-track. I had never heard of a 4-track before, but ended up buying it about a week after I got my first guitar.

I sold that, and started recording in an old demo version of N-track because it sounded "so clean".

From there I got a Fostex VF-16 on Ebay used, and used it for a bunch of live recordings and other demos for other bands.

Last February, I bought an Edirol UA-1000...10 in/10out via USB 2.0 recording into Tracktion.

And now, I use an old version of Pro Tools on a G3 at KVRX.

...I just realized you asked for our FIRST recording machine. Oops.

[joeysimms]

Probably this:



But my first 4-track was this;

[superluminalmagus]

My first recorders:
A really crappy computer with 650MB HD, 32MB RAM, 386 processor running Windows 3.1. I used MS soundrecorder to record stuff with one of those computer microphones. I also had a Tascam Portastudio 4 track that I got at a garage sale for like $1.

Mine wasn't nearly as fine as the one above.

[JohnDavisNYC]

tascam 234 that i rescued from a storage closet of the school my parents teach at when i was 13. that thing rocks. it's still out at that school somewhere... i should go steal it again. it was great.

john

[Devlars]

tascam 234 that i rescued from a storage closet of the school my parents teach at when i was 13. that thing rocks. it's still out at that school somewhere... i should go steal it again. it was great.

john

Was it one of these?

[marqueemoon]

It was a piece of poop.

[andyg666]

tascam 424 old school model. radio shack mic with the front half of the mic missing so the diaphragm was completely exposed. no pix, sorry, that stuff is LONG gone.

first comptuer music--bank street music writer for the commodore 64. it let you arrange music with 3 note polyphony using either sine, triangle, or sawtooth wave.

no pix--i only wish i had some.

[JASIII]

My first recorder was a dual cassette bbom box, you could play back both cassettes at the same time, synching up 2 cassettes was a bitch though. then last year i bought an otari mx5050

[joel hamilton]

I got a little 2 track (TUBE!!!) machine. Just a little Reel to reel thingy, with three tape speeds, 1 7/8, 3.75, and 7.5!!! Awesome. I got it for like 3 dollars at a yard sale that a pal of my parents was having. It was HIS dads! Like a 50's vintage thingy. I wish I still had it sOOOOOOOO bad. I used it as a guitar amp, and recorded so much stuff on that thing. I did all kinds of firesign theatre souding stuff on that, and me playing drums, and me playing guitar... Then I figured out how to trick the thing into recording one track at a time! HOLY CRAP... OVERDUBS!!! I freaked out and made like a trillion songs a week. Every day after school I would be in my room playing some little keyboard, then some guitar thing straight into the 1/4" "mic" input. Awesome. It had a little electric eye tube meter thingy, and I just always loved that thing. I broke it, then tried to "fix" it, then threw it away when I got some shitty early 80's fostex thingy... Crap. I figured out tape loops on that thing, and how to cut tape like crazy, when I would make my little sister speak a whole page of words for me, then I would re-arrange her words by splicing them and make her say stuff like "i stink like a donkey" and we would crack up. I didnt even know I was learning really valuable skills splicing individual words for hours in my bedroom when I was supposed to be asleep!

I loved the limitations of that cool little thing that forced me to figure out how to bounce over to cassette, while I played a bass to the other two tracks LIVE! Then Bounce back while I sang or played keyboard... Just crazy generation loss experiments, that I simply knew as "how I had to do it."

[xonlocust]

Probably this:

me too with one of those cassette things. mine was probably "realistic" brand. first mic i had was the headphones - i stayed up for hours making little stupid recordings with the headphone mic. absolutely blew my mind that you could use headphones as a microphone.

eventually i got a 4 track.

[Keegan]

Tascam Porta02, mostly used it in my dorm room. Given the space I had it served me well, and sounded like crap all at once

I just recently got an ADAT (blackface) and a Tascam 32 to replace it.

[Knights Who Say Neve]

My 1st was a home stereo unit (Toshiba) with a Mic input on the front, and a secondhand sm58.

Sometimes I would record using that, put the tape in a boom box, put the boom box a couple of feet behind me, and play it while I added sound effects or talked in the foreground. (I was doing "comedy"- this was before I was really interested in music).

Later, for my 1st band, I got a 2nd sm58. We arranged the amps in a semicircle in the corner of the room (small pratice amps-picture midgets huddled around a campfire) and I placed the 2 58s in a stereo V in the middle of them. Bass amp in the center, guitar and keyboard on either side. Then the mics were plugged into the rca connectors on the back of the tape deck via a chain of radio shack adaptors. I turned the gain on the tape deck all the way up and got a hissy recording that peaked at about -20. Crappy, but we used it to make a tape we gave away to our friends.

For the next recording I sold some D&D books, bought an alesis nanoverb, and plugged that between the mics and the tape deck. This added about 20db of gain and made it sound better. (I added just a little reverb as well).

After that I got a 414 and the recording bug had truely taken hold...

[trodden]

I had one just like that as well for my first "recording device." I'd use it for recording Olivia Newton John concerts on HBO by holding it up to the tv's speaker.. mono dude, translates really well dude.... but yeah hell, i was like 5 years old. THen by age 7 i was really fascinated by the little casio keyboards at WalMart, especially the drum machine/rythmn part. I wanted to make beats, so i'd borrow my dad's tape recorder (similar model) lay down a track of me beating some rudimentary beat that a 7 yr old could do using various things around my room as my "drums" then play that recording and play another beat on some "drum" along with that of while the second tape recorder picked that up... yeah, started early but i still can't play drums.

By 19 I finally got a Yamaha MT4X I believe it was called..



Funny after my experiments with the tape recording at age 7 and playing piano since 2nd grade and picking up the guitar at 16, i didn't get into recording the recording fanatic stage at such a later time.

Now its g4 on the digi001

[jrsgodfrey]

A Sony "Sterecorder" reel-to-reel from my parents early 70s hi-fi. It had speakers that clipped on the to sides and a handle for carrying it around. I inherited with it a 7" reel copies of "The Beatles" (brown box w/ the quad pic, not white) the Atlantic history of Rythm and Blues set, some Mancini and Tijuana Brass.

First I copied all my Beach Boys records at 3 3/4ips so I could listen non-stop.

Next, cut a hole in my brothers cheapie acoustic, dropped the table-top mic that came w/ the recorder in it and used it as an amplifier.

Then I listened to all the 7" reels backwards (inclduing Rev. #9)

Then I started to record myself singing and playing...

it's the one at the bottom of this ad page...