adventure in recording (part 2): tape to tape

20Jun11

at a sandwich secondary dance in lasalle ontario in 1985, my band the system (formerly modern method) opened for the jigsaw affair, a group of older and exceptional musicians from the same windsor suburb. the jigsaw affair consisted of jeff martin on lead vocals and guitar, jeff burrows on drums and his younger brother brad on bass. at the dance they played the new british music i was just becoming more interested in- the smiths, the cure, new order and echo and the bunnymen. the crowd responded like they were superstars. they played and sang exceptionally despite their age. when shortly after i got a surprise call from jeff martin, then fifteen – a year older than me – asking me to join the jigsaw affair, i leapt at the opportunity.

i immediately started practicing saturday afternoons with the band in jeff’s parents’ garage. the first song we played was david bowie’s rebel rebel, followed by girls don’t cry by the cure and everything’s gone green by new order. jeff and i became fast friends and would hang out at least a couple times a week outside of practicing. he would play me tapes he had recorded of the bands’ originals, mostly consisting of a roland tr-606 drum machine, bass, monophonic synthesizer, and vocals and guitars, much of it through a space echo (tape echo/delay machine). the recordings were simple and gritty and had that detached drama of the new wave era i was enamoured with. jeff copied a bunch of his music for me and i listened to it daily. i couldn’t believe i actually knew someone who created this progressive sound, and so well.

jeff  made these recordings with ingenuity and a unique stereo cassette player. it had two decks and a line-in jack on the front of the unit where you could plug in an instrument or microphone and add another instrument or sound on top of what was already recorded. to make a typical recording jeff would program a few rhythms on the drum machine and record that onto the cassette in real-time. then he would rewind the cassette, put a microphone in front of his guitar amplifier and plug the cable into the input of the cassette deck and  adjust the input level on the cassette deck to get enough sound without overloading the input too much. then he would press play on deck A where the drum machine was recorded and play/record on deck B which would then take the sound from deck A and combine it with the sound of him playing guitar to the drum machine. to add the bass he would swap the cassette from deck B back to deck A to play it with the combined drum machine/guitar while recording the bass plugged directly into the input on the cassette deck and just record over the previous music (now in deck B). he would repeat this process for each instrument to be recorded – swapping tapes deck to deck, adjusting levels, etc.  there was no mixing possible during this process. the only adjustment that could be made was between the level of the current instrument and its relation to everything else that was already recorded.

one song on my tape from jeff was called news like this. it was a good tune, pretty straight up new wave/pop with him playing everything himself. he put two versions of this song on my tape – one regular and another that had no vocals and had a long drum machine intro. i decided i wanted to try to make my own remix of this tune, combining the two versions with my ghetto blaster, which also had two cassette decks, no input though. i would choose the section i wanted and record that onto deck B. then i would have to keep the recording paused while i rewinded or fast-forwarded the master cassette in deck A, until i got to the section of the song i wanted placed next. then, with attempted surgical timing i hit play on deck A and record on deck B until that section was completed. i wanted 8 bars of just the drum machine intro but placed in the middle of the tune. so i would rewind to the beginning of the song on deck A and record that sound. but there were only four bars of the drum machine on the original recording, so i would have to pause, rewind the original tape back to the beginning and record those four bars again to get my total of eight. the remix was probably an afternoon’s work and i’m not sure why i really wanted to do it but it helps me now to understand why i undertake the ridiculous and time-consuming experiments i sometimes get myself into.

it’s amazing to me still that these recordings came out so well despite the numerous limitations of this process, let alone cassette tape as a medium. around that time i was looking for a cassette deck with this feature but was never able to find one. but on at least one occasion jeff and i made a recording like this together.

here is a recording we did of joy division’s love will tear us apart (a tune he and jeff burrows later revived in their successful career with the tea party). i play the lead guitar through a roland space echo on this one. jeff sings and plays the rest of the instruments.

Advertisement

Filed under: looking back, recording / producing   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: cassette, jeff martin, recording