When I started recording digitally on my home computer, things were very different to now. Today, we take for granted the GIgabytes of storage data that’s luxuriously provided by external hard drives, memory sticks and the like. Back in 1999, hard drives were tiny in comparison to now and if I wanted to buy an external backup drive, it would have probably been tape-based and cost me the same price as a small bungelow in Diss.
So in those dim-dark-days, you put your faith into recordable CD, which was still a relatively new medium. I remember my first CD-writer. It was a Hewlett Packard and I took great joy in spending over £250 on it and installing it into my home PC. In those days, I was paid with buckets of pound coins on an almost hourly basis, so money really was no object.
The only problem was this drive was a piece of shit. It wouldn’t write to the media, the discs were either wasted, or worked for a while before becoming corrupt and even the recommended Hewlett Packard branded discs wouldn’t work. Eventually, and after piles of shiny coasters produced by yours truly, I found some discs that would work with it.
The downside is that these discs seemed to have a self-destruct function and over time became unreadable. It is a fucking miracle that I’ve got any of my old music masters available, but sadly some tracks have been lost forever. I’ve gone over this old ground recently with my archiving project and it is sad when a particular song or mix exists no more in its fundamental parts. There’s no chance to revisit, reassess and sprinkle magic audio dust over the tracks. Those songs become fixed points in time and space, never to be changed again.
In one way this is a good thing because it preserves them, like prehistoric insects trapped in amber, and means that I can’t make a dog’s breakfast of the remix. But it is sad to think that I can’t make these songs sound a little bit better.
It also makes me grateful for this day and age when digital storage is abundant and relatively cheap compared to a decade ago. Now all my work exists on my hard drive, as well as being backed up on my network hard drive which has a backup. So effectively, there are three copies of my creative efforts at any one time.
How things have changed…for the better!

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