Gems from the 4-track

I went down to the basement this afternoon to take a look through my one remaining "nostalgia" tote, hoping to find a set of original song lyrics among the old papers, portfolio pieces and tchotchkes from my childhood. The search for the lyrics was futile, but instead I unearthed a wonderfully dusty and oddly petroleum-smelling machine from the surrounding 1990s ephemera. Back in the day, I had spent many hours loving and simultaneously hating this rectangular, gray hunk of plastic with its little switches, lights, dials and faders—my 4-track recorder.

A Tascam Portastudio 424. And yes, the moody photo is appropriate.

I'm not saying I stole it, per se, but it may have been borrowed and not especially returned. Musical equipment has a unique flow between musicians. Cables are forgotten. Stompboxes are borrowed. Large speakers are left in basements with the intent to "take it the next time we jam together". Like the One Ring, pieces of gear move from one musician to the next with a distinct will of their own. Sometimes, years later, you'll look for a piece of equipment in a long-undisturbed box and not be able to find it, and you have to just let it go—because that is the way of things. And thusly, I still own a 4-track recorder.

Now, it's a funny old relic, when computers come bundled with semi-pro recording software and my phone can do multi-track recording. But in my high school days, it was a magic box, allowing me to play guitar along to myself when everyone else had gone to bed. I'm glad I held onto a whole bunch of the cassette tapes, old and terrible as they are. 

With a bunch of jury-rigging—first to get it to power up, then to get the output into my computer—I was able to take a listen and re-bounce a bunch of tracks. I'll spare you the long, whiny, instrumental guitar tracks, but this one I couldn't resist.

On a tape simply labeled "MATT - GUITAR, ELEC.," there were at least three tracks: two guitar-heavy ones, and one that very well may be one of my first electronic music recordings. I had a version of Magix Midi Studio on my computer at the time and without a midi keyboard to my name, I sequenced the drums, keyboard parts and piano parts manually. Then at some point I bounced the track out to the 4-track, for safekeeping on a cassette tape, I suppose. It seems counter-intuitive to think that a cassette tape would be a better record of the song than a digital file, but that lovely beige computer and all its files are long gone, and lo and behold, I still have the tapes. 

So here's the track in all its midi loveliness, with some original cassette tape hiss and occasional stutters from the mid '90s computer it was running on. Deanna said, "it sounds like something from Tron." Judge lightly, I was like 16 years old, okay? Regardless, it's still fun to reminisce in such a tangible, aural way. Also, those synths are totally sweet.