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Home recording 20 years ago

Posted on 02. May, 2009 by cybergord in Home Recording

Home recording in the Eighties became a big passion of mine, I wanted to take control of my own music and I enjoyed coming up with different sounds and ideas that I usually picked up from friendly music jams and messing with bits of gear like foot pedals and the advancement of affordable sound modules that were hitting the home recording market at the time.

Before that… I was rooted in a plain live band that was borrowing that old rocknroll sound from the Fifties and churning out the same Chuck Berry come New York Dolls style riffs. Recording cost money in the studio and I was never impressed with our local studio that often even gave us free rehearsals, but they seemed disinterested in producing anything of qulaity with us and only existed because of local grants I believe.

Aside from having a good time playing gigs, I was keen to learn to write songs and I wasnt’ getting inspired with the basic sounds I was getting with my cheap guitar. The only tool I began with was one of the first Portable Amstrad Hi Fi’s that had a dubbing system built in, it was the first way to overdub tunes and mix onto one cassette tape.

When I eventually afforded a four track recorder I opted for the sleek Fostex X30 and i stuck with it for many years.
There began my experimenting with songs, sounds and creativity (in the comfort of the home). Of course a bunch of musician friends and our weekly £5 HiFi supplies (if you know what I mean) helped enormously.

I collected an array of cheap microphones and sound equipment and produced some odd disjointed compositions. The onus then was on dub music and also rigging up a number of microphones in rehearsals for my regular band. I soon put my first home made album together and I called it ‘Doomed for Destruction’ dedicated to the place where i lived which was a small bedsit that was part of a derelict and blighted block of houses. I was lucky at that time. The only neighbours were my drummers Mum and Dad and they didnt mind a bit about the racket that was coming from my yard in fact they encouraged musical creativity, for they were a down to earth Irish family and music was a big part of their life.

I soon exploited the empty block to my advantage and opened up some of the rooms for rehearsing and storing our gear without the landlady knowing what was going on, bands (Tenderman, DJF, Bandwagon, New Blood) came and went and parties were common. It was about that time i formed my own band for my own songs and welcomed my old friend Alfred Waight to be the lead guitarist, although these days an accomplished recorder,singer, songwriter and composer (DJF). He was happy to take the role of creative guitar solely to exploit his huge passion for everything guitar.

My best friends were drummers Dave McFarland and Gaz Muldoon and we knew a Saxaphone player Mick Penney and we recruited him too. I dropped my bass role and we found John Muldoon brother of Gaz to play bass. Now all my friends were a moments notice away and the creative forces began. As I said earlier most of my songs were an extension of my jam tunes that I crafted freely and shaped them up using my four track cassette recorder, sometimes experimenting with drum machines and delay pedals, old keyboards and whatever guitar foot pedals I could get my hands on.

Some of my first four track compositions were Deadpan Days, (It’s getting hard to be) The Life and Soul, Digging your own Grave, Take me for a ride and Pure and Godless. They became completed songs but there was many crazy dub and instrumental tunes that kept us amused at weekends.

I remember working with Fred Waight a lot and we enjoyed making odd and interesting tunes together, usually in Dub mode or psycheadelic guitar mode. Checkout Crossing Bridges we arranged together over my dub style drum mix.

During those times I enrolled in a local grant based Music and Media Course at the ‘Stoker’ in Coventry and they had computers, so I took advantage and used their free services to  make some drum based backing tracks to take home to my recorder and pile on the overdubs. You can see that in Melancholy Boy, Are you doing alright?, Confusion and Magic table of Dreams.

There was also many opportunities to capture my band live in rehearsals although it was very difficult to moniter levels due to the loudness and the dynamics of my creative friends. There were occasions when we got some great takes like You’re Killing Me, We Love Our Children, Starlights and Cities and The Blood of Arabia, which incidently is my most favourite  and magic live capture, all thanks for Mick Dolan who monitered the levels that evening.

There you have an overview of my home recording experience and the history of the long forgotten and possibly unnoticed ‘Those Cucumber Shades’. Only 10 gigs and the recordings that i made are the only proof of our existance in the Eighties and early Nineties and in the suburbs of Coventry, England when the only musical association to the city…’after the demise of the early Specials’ was their fine track ‘Ghost Town’.

Tags: djf, recording, those cucumber shades