Half-handed Cloud Learning About Your Scale Week TUESDAY: “Scale” LP – Day #2 – Before The Actual Sessions One place to start with the story of Half-handed Cloud’s “Learning About Your Scale” is with a used Fostex reel-to-reel 8-track ¼” tape recorder I purchased in the Fall of 1998. My buddy Brandon Buckner & I had heard about one that was for sale (possibly advertised on the McKay Used Books & CDs bulletin board), and drove to Fort Oglethorpe, GA to check it out. Brandon remembers that the guy I bought it from was named Rodney, who was some sort of DJ. I’d been involved in recording sessions with Brandon and his brother Eric for a couple years at that point (we had a few bands and self-released cassettes on a label they started named Corner Room Recordings). I had tried to pay attention as they were working the controls on their 4-track cassette recorder. Recording was such a blast—I had to get in on the action. So I bought DJ Rodney’s reel-to-reel 8-track, but then had to save several months (until May 1999) before I could afford a decent soundboard and cables to run the tape recorder properly. In the meantime, during the Winter and the Spring of 1999, the Buckner Brothers loaned me some sort of microphone input box that allowed me to make primitive recordings (I could barely get this method to work). Before I could afford a mixing board, the only way to really get sound to register loud enough on the tape was to first record the song onto a cassette boombox, then feed that into the 8-track and add overdubs as it was being fed in. Using this method, I made a couple acoustic guitar demos for an electronic band that Brandon and I were starting (A>Pants) and, sometime in the Spring of 1999, I began to tape some demos for Half-handed Cloud’s first album this same way (see Fig. 2, Reel #1 Mostly Pre-Board Demos tape box). An early, very lo-fi demo of 5 (or 8?) songs, that would later be re-recorded and rearranged for “Learning About Your Scale,” used this pre-soundboard process (see Fig. 3, Early Half-h Cassette Demo Tape). Some of the songs and song titles are slightly different on the demo—the third song was a working title for “Rewire My Desire.” Notice the old school print job!
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 14:00:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015