So you want to make an album? (part 3)
KeithHandy posted in Instruments, So You Want... on March 23rd, 2007
Installment 3: Meanwhile, Back At The Home Studio (1984-1987)
The two-cassette ping-pong rig was my demo-making mainstay for the entirety of my pre-college life. With no access to separate tracks, I had to mix every overdub as I played it. If it was too loud, too quiet, too wet or too dry… too bad. Also, I had to run the full length of the song to add anything to it, and if I messed up a take, I had to either rewind to the beginning and start over… or, more typically, try to somehow cover up the mistake with my next overdub. Fortunately, I hadn’t yet attained the neurotic levels of perfectionism that would later (particularly in my early 20s) come to all but paralyze my creativity.
I previously alluded to my “first legitimate synthesizer”. Like all things “first”, though, there’s always a path of “sort of firsts” leading up to it. Prior to the CZ-101, there was the Yamaha CP-7, a simplistic electronic “piano” that my parents had bought for my sister to practice on. Luckily for me, she lost interest immediately and I inherited it, sustaining me through the first few Glass Exit gigs and some song demos. I tried to give its lackluster sound some character by purchasing (and overusing to death) a $40 Boss wah-wah pedal. Later I took the CP-7 apart and franken-installed the guts of one of my reverbs, deliberately mis-wiring the instrument’s output to the reverb’s mic input to overload it for a distorted Deep Purple sound. Later still, I removed the keyboard altogether and painstakingly wired it up note by note to where the dismantled CZ-101’s keyboard had been, so that I could play it with a full-size keyboard. The resulting beastly contraption on a wooden board was then stolen from the trunk of my ‘81 Monte Carlo in college, marking the end of an era.
Concurrent with the CP-7, like many adolescents in the dawn of the home computer age, I was the proud possessor of a Commodore 64 computer, whose groundbreaking features included the three-voice SID synthesizer chip. While by today’s standards, the BASIC programs included in the tutorial booklet are downright unreadable — requiring non-descriptive PEEK and POKE commands to activate and control sound — a touch of obsession and a whole lot of attention span made it possible to literally write your own synthesizer (using the computer keyboard to play the notes) and/or sequencer. I even took it to a Glass Exit rehearsal once, but it proved too nerve-wracking to load and run the program from a cassette drive without having a TV screen available to see what I was doing.
Before that, I had a Casio VL-Tone, which was a cross between a calculator and a toy synthesizer with a rudimentary 100-note sequencer. You could “program” its sound by storing a number to the calculator’s memory - each digit represented either the waveform, a stage of the ADSR (attack, decay, sustain, release) envelope, or the vibrato. I took it apart and naïvely connected its speaker wires to the “phono” input of my parents’ stereo, reveling in the gloriously overloaded and distorted tone, and most certainly subjecting the stereo to irreparable damage.
I could go back even further and mention that the electronic Merlin game/toy had an extremely limited (one octave, no sharps or flats, only sound was “beep”) music sequencer, but now we’re venturing into primordial soup territory. The point I’m hopefully driving home is that there never really is a “first” anything, just a series of gradual steps towards it.
One thing I notice when re-reading my high school diary is that my motives for wanting to record an album were not always pure and noble. I apparently thought a few great recordings of original songs would be my ticket to a better social life. It’s full of embarrassingly repetitive fantasies of getting compliments and respect, and of people suddenly understanding that “side” of me. The idea of simply learning to enjoy people hadn’t quite occurred to me yet. Nor had the idea that some people might not be worth the mental energy. In any event, I was constantly filling notebooks with revised track listings for the album in my head that would one day win everybody over… or in the case of my enemies, piss them all off.
In my senior year, I was sidetracked by a strange turn of events. The folks running the school musical were apparently short of decent male performers for that year’s presentation of Anything Goes, and they asked me to audition. I showed up and rolled my eyes as I sight-sang Cole Porter songs without any feeling, hoping they would notice I was the wrong person for this. They wound up casting me in the lead role. I was flattered and couldn’t say no. Like WKRP’s Johnny Fever in his identity-endangering stint as TV disco host “Rip Tide”, I fought to cling to my rock and roll cred while (sort of) tap dancing and grudgingly singing lyrics like “please be sweet, my chickadee”. The one remnant of dignity I managed to stubbornly hold onto was my hair, which they had to spend hours pinning up to look short.
The reason this matters is that it got me thinking theatrically. At the final cast party, the director, Mark something (I’m sorry I can’t remember your last name, Mark) acknowledged me as having crossed over from the “live fast, die young world of rock and roll” as he handed me my gift: a book about rock musicals. The ego/esteem boost from all the attention and socializing, combined with that nod to the “real Keith”, planted another seed.
Glass Exit had broken up by this point (I quit first), although actually, apart from the guitarist, the other four of us were now in a band with a horn section, called “Up Front”, doing more upbeat music (mostly) for parties and dances. I also formed another band, “Liquid String”, for the sole purpose of doing one show of my originals, using only the bass player from Glass Exit and otherwise going out of my way to use as much fresh blood as possible. I wasn’t totally happy with how that show went, but in retrospect it showed some courage. Last but not least, right around graduation time, our music theory teacher generously talked a friend of his into letting Up Front record a few songs in his 24 track studio (my first of relatively few experiences in any pro facility), asking us only to thank the engineer with a case of beer. We did one angry-ish song of mine, and two fast-paced instrumentals that Jeff and his friend Gary had come up with. (Note: I’ll describe this experience in more detail when I elaborate on the differences between home recording and “real studio” recording.)
That summer, feeling the void where all the creative collaboration and excitement had been, I wrote in my diary (August 2, 1987):
I’ve got the most fleeting idea for a movie — a surrealistic rock opera for film — sounds good already, huh? Well, every time I think about it, I get depressed. I have no power to begin something like that now.
… I don’t know.
