My father was a medical doctor, and used reel-to-reel tape recorders for dictation, as dictation machines had not yet been invented. I got the “hand-me-downs”. So, at the age of seven or eight, I was playing with tape machines. I like to tell people that I was copying Beatle records before cassettes were invented. This is actually true.
When I was fifteen, a friend gave me a Sony reel-to-reel that allowed me to do overdubs. What fun that was! All through high school, I often stayed up late, piling track upon track, until the original tracks practically faded away from generation loss.
A few years later, I acquired a 4-track Teac. Despite the fact that these had been available since the early 70’s, I had never actually met anyone who owned one. Over the next six years, I ran it into the ground, recording everything from rehearsals, to gigs, to the occasional paying recording project. I became quite good at making good sounding recordings. Since I had been actively playing with tape recorders for over ten years already, I found it rather easy with such advanced tools! (I still own this very machine.)
In 1982, I was approached to help record an album for a record company called, “The Fast Folk Musical Magazine” (known originally simply as “The Coop”). The idea was to make a record (this was still the age of vinyl) with 12 different artists on it, each doing an original song. The record came with a magazine, which contained articles, editorials, the song lyrics, the local club calendar, etc. I thought it would be a one-time thing. Little did I know that it would become a 12-times-per-year venture that would last for over ten years. I did all the recording for the first five or six years (except for occasional live recordings). I also got to play whatever overdubs I felt fit, which included me often playing bass (my main instrument), sometimes an additional guitar, and sometimes even the entire band! Seizing this grand opportunity, led me to the next “upgrade”.
Later that same year, I bought a Teac 80-8, Teac’s first 8-track machine. It had an integrated DBX noise reduction unit, which made it possible to make relatively hiss-free recordings. Having eight tracks let me play all sorts of other instruments. I found myself backing up 12 artists a month, all being released for public consumption. The “artists” ran the gamut from locals who played the local scene, writers who never played gigs but had good songs worth hearing, the famous and formally famous who we could convince to come out to my house in Brooklyn to record (Peter Tork, Tom Paxton, Odetta, Richie Havens), to artists who became well-known later on (Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin, Steve Forbert, etc). This was an education that money could not buy.
During this entire period, I was playing in Greenwich Village backing up songwriters doing gigs ranging from folk to loud rock, at a rate of about twenty-five nights per month, year after year, often with both the opener and headliner. I was also building and repairing guitars, for many of the same people. And of course recording their records. I spent the better part of two decades doing this. I was very plugged into the whole Greenwich Village music scene during this time, you could say.
Here is an article from the NY Times written in 1992, about Fast Folk.
In 1986, I bought a Teac 85-16, Teac’s first 16-track. It was a large floor-standing machine on wheels, which weighed almost twice as much as I did!. Not only did it have eight more tracks, but sounded far better than the 8-track did. By this point, I was involved in recording full-time, with full-length album projects being the norm. Over the next four years, I literally wore the heads off this machine.
In 1990, I took out a lease in a much larger space in lower Manhattan, acquired a 2″ 24-track machine, got a much larger console, and set up as a full-blown commercial enterprise. Eight-hour days now became sixteen-hour days. I later opened a “B” room on the same floor, for those times when an “escape valve” was needed for the main room. Soon after that, a mastering room was also created. I also branched out into all the current forms of music, ranging from rock to jazz to classical to blues, and beyond.
All through the 90’s, I was working practically 24/7 helping people make albums, or “CDs” as they came to be called.
More later when I have time…
