One of the nation’s leading newspapers has broken the news today that certain musicians have actually built their own recording studios in their basements (as a southern Californian, I have not much experience with basements, but was told by my grandmother that they do indeed exist).
Apparently, the idea that a musician might want to record himself is a new one to D.C. residents, who assume, I suppose, that Capitol Sony, or EMI will call them in for a session as soon as they get their latest hit worked out. Self-recording turns out to be not really that new to me and my West Coast friends, many of whom have their own studios or at least recording gear. Computers have been miniaturized and in other ways have made the process easier (at least on the surface) compared to earlier days.
I remember my father buying a home recording outfit around 1949 that included a disc recorder with a built-in AM radio. The discs were thin aluminum, covered with a layer of black lacquer acetate which the heated recording stylus cut into to make the actual record. The disc had two holes; one in the center for the spindle, and one offset an inch or so to help lock the disc in place on the turntable to avoid skipping from the stylus pressure point while recording. Another thing, you cut the disc (literally!) from the inside out., This kept the tailings from the cut lacquer from fouling the cutting stylus. The ones used to produce commercial discs have a little vacuum next to the needle to suck up the threads – so they can be cut from the outside in, but the home models did cut a few corners. Of course, those aluminum discs were rather fragile and tended to get scuffed up and lost. Wish I could hear them again now…
My first recorder (in ’61) was a Roberts 7-inch reel-to-reel mono recorder which was a Japanese copy of the Ampex 601. It was big, very heavy, but made decent recordings. Now, of course, the tapes on which the recordings were made are in various stages of decay.
Digital recording is still in its infancy (as compared to the good old analog days…), but there have already been several permutations on the theme. I still own a Panasonic DAT machine (not portable), though I haven’t used it for several years. Then there’s recording direct to hard drive, the minidisc machines, and now, with the ever-dimishing proice of solid state memory, machines like the “Edirol R-09”, which record direct to RAM and transfer the results to a computer using a USB port.
For a link to that device, try this link: [ http://www.edirol.net/products/en/R-09/ ].