Tag Archives: Tascam DA-88

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When you’re a hammer, every song looks like a nail

Sure was a long, long hot summer night. Wait … was that more than one night? THREE MONTHS? Jesus, I slept late. Stupid alarm!

We’re coming to the close of a very quiet summer in Big Green land. Hey, you know how it gets – you spend two years on an album, drop the mother, then you’re on to other things. Matt’s holed up in his private compound deep in the woods of Central New York, churning out songs, writing a book, feeding the beavers at Spring Farm (pictured above), and generally making a nuisance of himself.

Me? I’m flying in my taxi, taking tips and gettin’ …. wait, no, that’s not it. Just keeping the home fires burning, folks. We’ve got pieces of the next project under construction, pre-production if you will (and even if you won’t), and some tracking. It’s a slow roll, but it’s a roll.

Friends in Manila (and Jakarta)

Funny thing about our latest album, In Retrograde, is that it’s doing better in The Philippines than pretty much anywhere else. Who’s number 2 in the Big Green fan club? Indonesia, that’s who. Could have knocked me over with a feather when they told me that. Longtime readers of this blog may remember our shaggy dog tails about our Jakarta-based corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm. If THOSE dudes find out people are listening to us over there, lord only knows what comes next.

What’s their favorite song? Far and away, it’s Matt’s “Could Be On Your Way“, one of my personal favorites on that long-ass album.

It’s a bit of a sleeper, but I like it because it makes us seem like we actually work up arrangements rather than just play random instruments about a million times until it sounds like something.

They got it the wrong way round, see?

Other groups (and they know who they are) look at us like we have two heads because of the way we work. My response to them is, yeah, we have two heads because we’re two people. What’s confusing them, though, is that we use digital recording tools – computer workstation, digital instruments, etc. – but record in a super old-school way. We’re just playing parts, overdubbing, punching in, etc., like we were running a Tascam 8-track deck. No sequencing, no virtual stuff, aside from drum patterns.

Call us Luddites. Call us cavemen. Call us anytime – we’re always glad to hear from you. Yeah, we’re set in our 80s counterculture ways, so what’s new? We may have it the wrong way round, but it’s the right way to our dumb asses. Thing is … how is it that these Southeast Asia listeners are finding “Could Be On Your Way” when it’s seventeen songs into a remarkably obscure 24 song album?

It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma then dunked into conundrum sauce. Sounds delicious!

WTF is next, anywho?

Well, that’s anyone’s guess. We’re in pre-production for another new music project, and then there’s all the Ned Trek stuff that needs to be remastered. Suffice to say, there’s no rest for the weirdies.

Usual Rubbish

Missing Pieces.

2000 Years to Christmas

Well, then, where the hell is it? I left it right here. Jesus mother of pearl, everything grows legs around here, the moment you turn your back. I’m living in a den of thieves! An abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill full of thieves!

Oh, hi. Just getting down to our yearly inventory of band equipment; a kind of rejuvenating exercise that keeps us prepped for any performance or recording opportunities that may come our way at random. Are we getting offers? Well …. not as such. in fact, big fat nothing. That phone hasn’t rung in weeks. Sure, that may be down to the fact that I unplugged it from the wall, but hell …. all that was calling us was creditors, looking for cash. Stupid creditors! They should have known better than to lend money to us. We’re just not trustworthy. (Especially that man-sized tuber. He has deep roots in the Genovese crime family. Um … actually, we’re only certain that he has deep roots – it was our assumption that they at some point touch something associated with the Genovese crime family.)

Anyway, our inventory turned up some missing items. Somebody walked off with my stomp-box phaser, for instance. If I still played a Fender Rhodes and needed a cheap organ sound, I would be using that thing. Of course, there are several missing cords and at least one mic stand. Also, our DA-88 8-track digital tape recorder apparently had its insides hollowed out and is now a mere shell of itself. If you stick a Hi-8 tape into its tape-hole, the only sound you will hear will be that of the cassette dropping uselessly to the floor plate inside the unit. You’ve heard of people breaking into houses and stealing all of the copper pipes and wires? Yeah … I think they broke into our 8-track machine. And they stole all eight tracks.

Hey! That's my jumbo country western guitar!

See, here’s the thing about living in a squat house: you’ve got zero security and absolutely no right to complain. I mean, what are we going to do … call the cops? They’ll just laugh at us, then take us down to the station where they can laugh at their own convenience. Now, I would like to think that these actions demonstrate the authorities’ well-concealed determination to house the houseless – a jail cell is, in a certain sense, a roof over your head, right? But that’s Panglossian nonsense. In any case (and I recognize that I’ve wandered a bit), every November we discover that things have gone missing, grown little legs and walked away. What can I say? We haven’t had a steady guitar player for many years, and yet stuff still continues to walk out of here. (Yeah, that was an unfair slam on guitar players. Mea culpa.)

Word to our readers: if you go to a garage sale in this area and you see deeply discounted used band equipment (including my goddamn guitar tuner), call our dumb asses.

Usual Rubbish

Light on.

Okay, commence recording. The light is on, folks. No, not THAT light! That’s the freaking microwave! That just means your burrito is cooked. I mean the production light. Jesus.

Oh, hi. Yeah … we’re working on some more music, but it’s not obvious what exactly we’re working on. Is it an album? An EP? A single? Some throwaway tunes for the podcast? Anyone’s guess. All I know is that the light goes on and I start playing. When it goes out, I stop. Sometimes it flickers on and off, and that makes my job a bit harder. I see that and I drop in a lot of eighth-note rests – it can sound kind of funky if you close your eyes (and your ears, too).

We’ve made something of a habit of recording over the decades. Given that we’re not a performing band at this point, at least not in the conventional sense, recordings pretty much amount to our “performances”. But recording has been a bit of an obsession over the years, from Matt’s reel-to-reel and cassette tapes, to 4-track cassette, to recording in various studios, to acquiring an 8-track Tascam DA-88 deck, then a 16/24-track Roland VS2480 workstation, and now a Cubase system. Hey … we’re archivists. Why fight it?

Is the light on? As part of our THIS IS BIG GREEN February podcast, I included a couple of old numbers drawn from demos. One of those was digitized straight from a standard audio cassette, simply because we never owned the original media it was on – a 2500-ft reel of half-inch audio tape from 1986, probably now nothing more than cinders. The 1981 recording (Silent as a Stone) was taken from a reel-to-reel stereo dub – you can hear the tape (or my playback machine) failing at the end. That song came from a session where we recorded four songs, including one of mine and one of Matt’s. The 1986 version of “Slipping and Sliding” was recorded on an 8-track reel-to-reel machine as part of a 4-song demo; that I only have an audio cassette of.

So here we are again, toiling away on audio artifacts that someone will happen upon years from now and scratch their heads over. Which is pretty much how we find listeners. It’s a process that works on geological time, basically, like making feldspar. (Hmmmm … good idea for an album title. Feldspar … )