About this time last year, I bought a Yamaha MT4X four-track tape recorder secondhand from eBay with the intention of transferring all my old recordings to the digital domain. Of course, other things distracted me from actually getting around to doing this, but the other night I thought I’d better get my house in order.
It was the early hours and I honestly thought I was having a heart attack and passing on. It was as if an invisible elephant was sitting on my chest and no matter what I did, I could not get relief. Thankfully, I worked through this strange incident and I am still here. It was probably just indigestion or trapped wind, but the cold sweats and the urge to defecate on the spot made my mortality even more tangible than usual – so I have set to work transferring all these old tapes onto my PC. The logic is that if I did suddenly die, the Missus wouldn’t have the first fucking clue on how to do any of this, so I’d better tidy up before I go.
So the last few evenings, after tales of Milly-Molly-Mandy and kisses goodnight to Verity, I have retreated to the mixing desk and having to relive every awful thing I’ve ever recorded. My goodness, I have recorded an awful lot of crap in my time. Unfortunately, washing out your ears doesn’t take away the pain of listening to my first early fumblings into recording.
Whereas other musicians have paid their dues by playing with other people and actually played gigs and practised, all my musical development has been committed to tape and hard disc. This is how I’ve paid my virtual dues – so I have to live with every shit idea, whereas proper musicians forget bad gigs and duff performances in a fug of booze and dubious white powder.
One of the first proper “songs” I ever recorded was something called “Electric God”. In those days, I was using four-track tape and bouncing down tracks, so it was really hard to edit stuff. Whereas now, editing music is a bit like blowing your nose. So my ideas in those days were usually presented “as is” with no way of editing out the bad bits (or maybe I just didn’t know how to) and then mixing down a stereo master to tape, rendering the dynamics to a pool of audio mush.
I’ve tinkered with this track and tarted up the audio somewhat. This isn’t very good – I’d only been messing around with guitar for a year or so, but my bass playing is solid. Always a better bass player. I’ll post both versions – the old 1992 master and the new tinkered version. The latter just sounds a bit fizzier.
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Direct download: CLICK HERE