Hello all, I am new to the forums but old to chordbook.com (as I rather enjoy the Guitar tuner).
I see that the forums don't get much traffic, but I joined anyway. I figured I'd share some stories of my musical adventures for the entertainment of others so here goes...
I started as a learn-as-you-go guitarist (often mistakenly referred to as 'self' taught) Back in the late 90's, and I still cannot absorb a lesson properly. Anyway, after a couple of years of pounding around on a overpriced pawn shop acoustic, I could play the obligatory Zeppelin riffs and improvise in 1-4-5 even though I didn't know what that meant. In grade 10 (2000) I got my dads old electric guitar that someone had made themselves in the 50's, which sounds cool in theory, but in practice its just a junker that hurts the most hardened of fingers. I made a friend up the street who had a sweet Mexican Strat, well...at the time it was sweet. We would jam out the most ridiculous sounding garage rock that we wrote ourselves or attempted to cover from such bands as the Beatles and Nirvana, or the Who and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The cherry on top was that we recorded it all on an old clock radio:  http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9 … GKlWOOfFQS
It took cassettes, of which we had ample, and we couldn't tell the quality difference at the time. Heck, we referred to a 1/4" to 1/16" T.R.S. adapter as    "de-bigners" the inverse was "im-bigners" (yes spell check, those words are spelled wrong, I get it). During that time I was always messing about with computers and soon I figured out how to record a guitar track through the Mic input using windows sound recorder. Not to long after I found a program called cool edit pro 2 that blew us out of the water. I figured out that we could record 2 separate tracks at the same time by splitting the left and right mic input channels using the main and monitor line outs on my newly purchased (a used one of course) powered mixer (yorkville micromix mp140). To prevent sound bleeding from the speakers into the mix, I had to unplug the speakers from the mixer, and as you may know; powered mixers LOVE having their amp running full blast with no actual place to put that output. I still have that mixer btw, and it works awesome, oh, and it's drank as much beer as any of us. With that futuristic 2 track tech, we could record a live band in my friends basement using 2 very mismatched microphones (a V-tech and a Sennheiser) in FULL STEREO SOUND! Fun on a bun. I learned a bunch about sound production just making those sound recordings. And we learned a lot about not tripping on cables as they were spiderwebbed everywhere. We hung mic's from the rafters to get different sounds, and for lack of a mic stand...
I got better and better at recording and we built a sound proof room out of 1x1's, egg cartons, and blankets. It was sound proof because we ended up hating it and never using it as it was brutally stuffy, and the blankets ate up any presence the instruments had. Friends and musicians came and went, as we were the only ones with super cool and ridiculous recording studio, and my friend turned legal age to drink before anyone, which had nothing to do with his popularity, it just made the music sound tolerable. I got into sequencing and loops ( industrial, electronica) which led to making my own bed tracks and realistic sounding drum loops, and digital orchestral. My friend went off to school for music production at a very high end studio. We learned just how wrong we had been doing things all along, and it certainly destroyed our creativity as real music production doesnt allow for creativity as much as people would like to think. The plus side is, He shared with me so much invaluable information on production, mixing, engineering, song writing, an immeasurable wealth of knowledge really. Unfortunately, we had a falling out as people do when they get so close and the problems become so personal there is no outlet but each other. All that knowledge he shared with me I use every day, and I improve on myself and my techniques constantly. And that is a strange statement because I wont play or make music for days, or record for months, but in my mind I am always thinking on all these great ideas and applications, and listening to what others are doing, to see what I can add to my knowledge base, and learning the technical side of things can launch you ahead light years, but creativity and impulse is key to a great recording...
and yes, it makes me smile to think that those cassettes we recorded are still kicking around in his moms basement somewhere, and its crazy that that was only 11 or so years ago.   

-Sorry for the grammatical and punctuation errors, English is my first language, so there was no need to learn it properly.
    Neil V

Feel free to post you own tale of interest!

Hello Neil,

Welcome to the forums.  Its been quite slow around here as of late,  but hopefully things will pick up again after the holidays.
Some interesting stories you got there!  I spent alot of years in biz, Playing, working "FOH" live mixing, and 'doin time' in studios.
When you say there is "not much room for creativity" in the recording/engineering aspect of the game I have do disagree.  I am a graduate of the "Anheiser Busch" school of creativity.  Our motto being, "Necessity may be the mother of invention but beer is the mother of creativity".  They would probably have to build an addition onto the library of congress to facilitate the storage of the many alcohol related creations we have used (or tried to use).  Most of them did what we intended (for the most part) and the ones that didnt usually did something totally of the wall, but most of time we found a use for them as well.  One for instance was we needed to reproduce the sound of a circa 1950's AM radio broadcast.  Of coarse we didnt have any vintage radio broadcast mic's from that era layin around, so after a few beers and the exchange of several really stupid ideas we ended up using the talk-back mic in the studio mixer console and an old 5 band graphic EQ of the "car sterio" variety.  Sounded like s*it,  exactly what we needed.  Oh BTW, english is my first language too and so I never bothered to learn it either...however I have learned to misspell, fracture, mutilate, and totally destroy any hint of proper syntax and punctuation. (an art in itself).  Anyway if you find yourself in a jam looking for a new sound or just some way to hook something up that seems imposable, drop me an Email or just post your dilemma here.  Theres a good chance I've been there or done it.  And if not, I'm sure we can come up with something.

Take care, and hope to see ya on the boards more often...

Jim

Interesting story Neil and welcome aboard, hoping to hear more from you.

Hey J, good to see a post. Catch me up.

Holiday Cheers,

GuitarZen

neil_v wrote:

Hello all, I am new to the forums but old to chordbook.com (as I rather enjoy the Guitar tuner).
I see that the forums don't get much traffic, but I joined anyway. I figured I'd share some stories of my musical adventures for the entertainment of others so here goes...
I started as a learn-as-you-go guitarist (often mistakenly referred to as 'self' taught) Back in the late 90's, and I still cannot absorb a lesson properly. Anyway, after a couple of years of pounding around on a overpriced pawn shop acoustic, I could play the obligatory Zeppelin riffs and improvise in 1-4-5 even though I didn't know what that meant. In grade 10 (2000) I got my dads old electric guitar that someone had made themselves in the 50's, which sounds cool in theory, but in practice its just a junker that hurts the most hardened of fingers. I made a friend up the street who had a sweet Mexican Strat, well...at the time it was sweet. We would jam out the most ridiculous sounding garage rock that we wrote ourselves or attempted to cover from such bands as the Beatles and Nirvana, or the Who and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The cherry on top was that we recorded it all on an old clock radio:  http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9 … GKlWOOfFQS
It took cassettes, of which we had ample, and we couldn't tell the quality difference at the time. Heck, we referred to a 1/4" to 1/16" T.R.S. adapter as    "de-bigners" the inverse was "im-bigners" (yes spell check, those words are spelled wrong, I get it). During that time I was always messing about with computers and soon I figured out how to record a guitar track through the Mic input using windows sound recorder. Not to long after I found a program called cool edit pro 2 that blew us out of the water. I figured out that we could record 2 separate tracks at the same time by splitting the left and right mic input channels using the main and monitor line outs on my newly purchased (a used one of course) powered mixer (yorkville micromix mp140). To prevent sound bleeding from the speakers into the mix, I had to unplug the speakers from the mixer, and as you may know; powered mixers LOVE having their amp running full blast with no actual place to put that output. I still have that mixer btw, and it works awesome, oh, and it's drank as much beer as any of us. With that futuristic 2 track tech, we could record a live band in my friends basement using 2 very mismatched microphones (a V-tech and a Sennheiser) in FULL STEREO SOUND! Fun on a bun. I learned a bunch about sound production just making those sound recordings. And we learned a lot about not tripping on cables as they were spiderwebbed everywhere. We hung mic's from the rafters to get different sounds, and for lack of a mic stand...
I got better and better at recording and we built a sound proof room out of 1x1's, egg cartons, and blankets. It was sound proof because we ended up hating it and never using it as it was brutally stuffy, and the blankets ate up any presence the instruments had. Friends and musicians came and went, as we were the only ones with super cool and ridiculous recording studio, and my friend turned legal age to drink before anyone, which had nothing to do with his popularity, it just made the music sound tolerable. I got into sequencing and loops ( industrial, electronica) which led to making my own bed tracks and realistic sounding drum loops, and digital orchestral. My friend went off to school for music production at a very high end studio. We learned just how wrong we had been doing things all along, and it certainly destroyed our creativity as real music production doesnt allow for creativity as much as people would like to think. The plus side is, He shared with me so much invaluable information on production, mixing, engineering, song writing, an immeasurable wealth of knowledge really. Unfortunately, we had a falling out as people do when they get so close and the problems become so personal there is no outlet but each other. All that knowledge he shared with me I use every day, and I improve on myself and my techniques constantly. And that is a strange statement because I wont play or make music for days, or record for months, but in my mind I am always thinking on all these great ideas and applications, and listening to what others are doing, to see what I can add to my knowledge base, and learning the technical side of things can launch you ahead light years, but creativity and impulse is key to a great recording...
and yes, it makes me smile to think that those cassettes we recorded are still kicking around in his moms basement somewhere, and its crazy that that was only 11 or so years ago.   

-Sorry for the grammatical and punctuation errors, English is my first language, so there was no need to learn it properly.
    Neil V

Feel free to post you own tale of interest!

Quite interesting story you've got there
You're knowledge will be quite useful here at anytime

and yes, technology wise, everything has changed quite dramatically..
what happened to those days where everything was 'original'?

T