Gearchild why?

Photo by Dad

From the moment we run to the candy store with our first nickel of allowance, through our working years, and hopefully into a "comfortable" retirement, we are doing it. Buying stuff. More than we need to get by, and frankly, a lot stuff we don't need at all.

It's no secret constant consumption is bad for the earth — with the pollution and waste endless manufacture creates, who could argue it isn't? All goes into the land fill. Where is that going to lead?

Is it some kind of addiction? Is constantly buying anew an attempt to drown out the horrible inevitability of death and decay? Are we just avoiding the larger questions, like: Why are we here? God? What happens (if anything) when you die? And, Gearchild, why?

Well, consumption has always bothered me. I've had many a fantasy of the ultimate monastic uncluttering. Some clothes, a book to draw and write in and that's it. I would be free of the burden of my things, open to life unfolding around me, with the mental space to go deep within and engage in meaningful self-discovery. And outside-of-self exploration would be all the more simple without all that baggage! Oh, to simplify!

Um, wait a second.

My wallet, my keys, I need them. A watch. Um, a cell phone is really a necessity these days. I guess I need a car, to get around, where I live. And, oh without this laptop, I'm screwed. But that's it. I'm done.

I do read on occasion. So some books.

Oh yea, a camera, to keep a record of it all, you know, and well, let's not forget all that other gear. I mean, I'm a musician of sorts. I need my instrument. Instruments, plural, that is. And to keep a record of what I do with those instruments. . . well, I guess I need a recording setup, a mixer, some cables, I/O, etc, etc... And suddenly I'm in the thick of it. I'm guilty of gathering stuff.

And it's a burden. It is. To afford it, to keep it working, keep it clean and to give the stuff your time. Here, the monk fantasy comes creeping back. Oh, to just be free of it all!

Stuff owns you, it sometimes seems.

But over time, I've become reasonably self aware. I've not broken free from the clutches of the urge to possess, but I'm clearer on why I appreciate this or that, why I want it.

Ultimately it comes down to a person. Someone, some actual human, designed that guitar, or beer bottle or software program. There is humanity inside my stuff. And it's a wonderful thing when the person who dreamed that beautiful thing up can connect with me with their creation.

At least with my gear, I own it serially. Get one, sell one. Like that. There is less waste because doesn't go into the dump right away, but rather finds a second life with someone else. Or I save it from the dump. And I buy used. In these ways I try and stay green. And really, how many guitars can ten fingers focus on anyway?

My beloved gear serves to help answer, not avoid the big questions. Because in music, art, and all things creative, you evoke the divine from within, you meld into the participatory, creative moment where "what's it all about?" doesn't exist, because you're in the middle of "it." Beauty exists, or another kind of expression. One that connects you to life, and keeps you in discovery mode, expanding, growing. As a child.

A gearchild.

Tascam 144 Brain Thaw

Student loan money, about a grand, bought me this in 1980.

In response to a question on how to use the Tascam 144, I will attempt to activate a portion of my brain perhaps petrified. It has been been 30 plus years, but I used this thing till my fingers bled, so I bet I still remember.

WHAT-A-STUDIO? Back in the day (and still) a regular cassette tape played back in stereo, 2 channels, going in one direction.Then you'd flip it over and it played two more in the other direction. It had 4 distinct "tracks" to record audio, 2 in each direction.
Teac-Tascam had the brilliant idea to use this existing technology more creatively. By recording all four channels in one direction and playing them back simultaneously, you had a multi-track, four track capability on standard, available cassette tape. Doubling the speed of the tape, thus increasing fidelity, helped, and then they added noise reduction to reduce hiss. they put a really good transport system on it, that allowed you to punch in, or drop into a recording and start recording anew without the thump you usually get on consumer decks. A mixer was added to the recorder, and there you had it. A totally portable studio. A PORTASTUDIO.

CHANNEL STRIP

• You have 4 channel strips with: micline/tape select button, trim knob, eq knobs, send knob, pan knob and a fader.
• The trim adjusts how sensitive the mic/line input (plug in the back) will be. Left least, right most sensitive.
• The micline/tape button selects which input will feed the channel strip – either mic/line source plugged into the back, or the audio already recorded on the corresponding tape track.
• Of course you have those beautiful old fashioned UV meters with the needles jumping around.

MASTER SECTION

• A master fader that controls the level of all those first 4 combined in a stereo mix.
• Above it you have bus selector buttons to select which buss, left or right will record.
• Then the track selector buttons, to choose which track on each buss will record.
• Off turns recording, well, OFF.
• Andaux return knob adjust how much comes back to the master mix from the aux return input out back
• Monitor knob and buttons giving you choice of cue or mix to listen to via your phones.

CUE

• Then over on the right you have 4 more "cue" knobs. They will allow you to mix what's already on tape and listen to it as you overdub new tracks over already recorded ones, so you can play guitar along with the drum track you first recorded, and then add the bass... etc.

STEREO BUSS WHAT?
What the #$%$# is that, you ask. Basically you can record one or two tracks at once, over a stereo buss, aiming your audio left or right with the pan knobs on each channel strip. The little buttons over the master fader choose which buss you want to record onto, left or right. Don't be confused into thinking what you record left, stays left. It doesn't. It just sends it to a certain part of the tape. You can pan every channel to where you want in your final mix.
Below that, the track selector buttons for which track will record. Or if you want to turn recording off on that buss. You can record one left and one right track, 2 at a time... it is a stereo buss, after all. So it's 1 or 3 and 2 or 4.

So say you pushed in the 1 button and on the other buss, the 4. You would then be recording tracks 1 and 4 at the same time. Whatever sound source you have plugged into your track inputs 1-4, will go to either left, to track 1 or right, to track 4, depending how you have the pan knobs set on those input channels. Panned hard left you are recording to track 1, hard right to 4 and in the middle to both. So you can put in 4 mics for four singers in to inputs 1, 2, 3, 4 and pan the mics all over the stereo field and get a stereo spread, or pan some hard right and others hard left to record them specifically on only 1 or 4. Get it?

DO IT
Plug a sound source, say a mic, into the back, input 1. Pan hard left on the channel's pan knob. Plug another into input 2 or 3 or 4, it doesn't matter, and pan hard right. The first will record on track 1, the second on track 4. Make sure the push button at the top of the row is set to "mic/line." That sets the input directed down that channel strip. If set to "tape" you'd be using the recorded track as your source material, and re-recording it to another track. That's how you "bounce" tracks down, combining perhaps 3 tracks to one, to open those first three up for more audio.

Hit pause and record. (or was it pause and play and record at the same time?) Tape is not rolling yet. Remember, the trim knob at the top of the channel strip controls how sensitive the input will be. Start dialed all the way left and work clockwise until you have a UV meter level just peaking before the red zone.

RECORD
Start recording and go for a while. Now rewind, flick those channel selector buttons over to 2 and 3, dial up cue knobs 1 and 4, and do it all over again. You are hearing your first take on 1 and 4 and recording 2 new takes on 2 and 3. Bingo. Your tracks are full.

YOUNG AND BOUNCY
This where the beauty of "bouncing comes in." You can combine, or bounce tracks together along with more live audio, if you like, to another track(s). The same way those Beatles did Sgt. Pepper... It's only 4 tracks, but by bouncing them together and opening up the original tracks for more music, you can create layers and layers and layers.

BACK UP A BIT
So wait. Don't fill up your tracks like I just said. Try something like this: record a drum track on 1, then a bass on 2, then a guitar on 3. Rewind. Then push in the micline/tape selector to "tape" on channels 1, 2 and 3 and pan those hard right. Push the record selector button 4 into record. Plug a mic and a tamborine into input 4, with the micline button on mic/line. pan hard right too. Hit play to adjust the mix as you combine drums guitar bass and live tamborine to 4. Levels look good? Not too much in the red? Rewind and hit record.

Now you should have everything (ok it's mono) on track 4. Go back and record backup vocals on 1 and harmony on 2. Then bounce them over to 3 as you add another vocal. Now you can record a lead guitar on one, bounce that over to 2 as you add a synth. Then go back and record your lead vocal on 1. You have drums, bass, guitar, guitar on 4, 3 vocals on 3, guitar and synth on2 and vocal on 1. Ten tracks, and you only bounced things once at most, so they sound pretty good still. It does deteriorate with every generation.

It really makes you think and train your ears when you have to commit to a bounce and plan all this stuff.

HAVE SOME PUNCH
Mind you the Tascam can punch in too. You sang a flat note? Just hit record on the fly and it cuts right in seamlessly. Very cool. You can use the aux send to send tracks or live inputs to effects devices and return them to the effects return. Or return them back into another channel strip. Explore the inputs on the back.

SSlowww mO
Don't ignore the varispeed knob. You can slow down the tape and sing. Speed up and be a chipmunk. Or go the other way and Turn a guitar into a bass. Song sluggish? Crank the speed up a tiny tad for that extra surge or energy.

?
Ok, so that was pretty confusing, but once you get the hang of this thing it's very intuitive. Loads of fun too.

Your "new" portastudio is actually very old though. So expect drive belts to break, and what not. There are lots of forums online where people can help you fix these machines. I used a dime store rubber band for once about 3 months. It held pretty well.

NOSTALGIC PURCHASE TIME
Now excuse me, I feel drawn to prowl ebay for a deal on one of these...

Zoom RhythmTrak RT-123

. . . yet another drum machine, but it's see-through!

Don't get me wrong, even though this was a bottom-of-the-line box it did have 3 tracks to sequence. You could fire off patterns, even multiple patterns, at the same time, on the fly, d.j. style – and it had bass sounds!

And yes, it was a produced in very beautiful see-through blue plastic. I loved it as an object.

Specs:
• Drum kits: 80.
• Bass programs: 25.
• Rhythm patterns: 297 preset, 99 user.
• Songs: 99.
• Maximum notes: 10,000.
• Maximum polyphony: 30 voices.
• Resolution: 96 PPQN.
• Tempo range: 40-250bpm.
• Quantise values: quarter, eighth, eighth triplet, sixteenth, sixteenth triplet, thirty-second, thirty-second triplet notes, and off.
• Outputs: quarter-inch jack (L/Mono, R); headphones.
• Inputs: MIDI In; quarter-inch mono line in; footswitch.
• Power: 9V AC.

After playing with it for a while I ended up triggering sounds on this from my sequencer. When it comes down to it, unless you are not computer savvy, who needs a drum machine? Sequencers are more powerful and easier to edit.

Goods: It was pretty translucent blue plastic toy. The pads lit up. Ooh! It was fun and really small.

Bads: No tuning on the sounds. It had a high end bite that I found low-rez sounding. Only stereo audio outs, and no midi out, so forget about exporting your pattern data.

I think it cost about $125. I got like $90 or so for it after a few months. You can pick one up on ebay now for about $50, I'd guess.

Garbage Drum Set

Garbage Drum Set, 2008.

If you read my previous post on the AMPEG REVERBEROCKET 2, you know I like to rescue musical instruments from the landfill. It's amazing what people will throw away.

But drums, I'm not surprised people chuck them. Here's a typical scenario:

Teenage boy, let's call him Boomer, begs for a drum set. It's appears under the Christmas tree and everyone is so happy. But that fades, at least for the parents and siblings, when it becomes clear how LOUD drums are in real life. Sound like I'm talking from personal experience? Well, maybe a little. click for more info on my teenage drums.

Boomer spends a few years making obnoxious sounds in the cellar with his buddies. Then maybe he loses interest, goes to college, moves out, leaving the drums at home with the folks. (Not personal experience).

Eventually the folks decide to clean up their empty nest. You can bet those drums are among the first things on the curb: Associated with headaches and those wonder years when Boomer's parents wondered if their boy would ever amount to anything. On top of that, drums take up a lot of space better served by a new home theater!

Here's the history of my Garbage Drum Set:

FIRST The beat up gold glitter Ludwig 14" floor tom seen poking out below the mounted tom in the photo, found sitting on the curb. The Ludwig badge was missing, but I recognized its ghost around the air hole.

THEN A tiny silver Rogers tom, 12", again out on the curb. I put it on ebay expecting $20. I shipped it to the lucky winner in Puerto Rico who paid me $240! The profits are shown in the picture: A used cheapo snare, no-name, red glitter, $35 on ebay. The cymbals: Paiste 16" crash and Zildjian New Beat High Hats, small crack, $75 for the bunch, also on ebay. The hardware and Sabian ride I bought new with the rest of the $240.

NEXT A 22" bass drum (not shown) and the black toms, 13" and 14" and 16" (floor) in the photo. Later I found a better bass drum on the curb, and that's the one you see here, but it was missing a hoop out front.

ESP Call it a hunch, call it crazy — all I know is that I got in my car with a sense of certainty, and within 10 minutes found a hoop, the right size, in somebody's else's trash. It's the white one in the picture.

These drums are not precious. But they are certainly loved, maybe more than Boomer was.

Ampeg Reverberocket 2 GS-12R

Ampeg Reverberocket 2, circa 1965. Mine since 2005.

I am pretty green. I don't like waste. It's one thing to recycle water bottles, but how about not using them at all? Refill a good sports bottle and use it for the rest of your life.

What really gets to me is when people waste the stuff I really love: GEAR. I always scan the curbs on Bulky-waste-day here in my suburban hamlet. That is when people are allowed to put out their larger trash for pickup. Perhaps I'd spy an old drum set, or guitar amp that I could fix up and use for the rest of my life.

Well you've guessed it, and now you will become green — with envy that is — because this vintage 1965 Ampeg tube amp was found at curbside, headed for the landfill.

You cannot imagine how fast I scooped this up, took it home and plugged it in. That little red glowing light told me the thing worked. I knew that had found a treasure. I did some research and found that these sold in the $500-$800 range.

It was in really good cosmetic shape, and played well. I discovered the reverb was out, and that it tended to produce noise and hum.

After a few years of sitting around, plugging in now and then, I decided to take it to a repair place. They cleaned the pots, replaced a tube or two, got the reverb to work, and replaced the missing handle. About $150. Not bad for a vintage all-tube amp.

When it comes down to it though, I'm a songwriter, singer, keyboardist, drummer and guitarist, in that order. So something this sweet is sort of a waste on me. And I don't like waste, as I've mentioned.

Profit is O.K., though, so this is up on ebay. Buy it now for $650.

Roland XP50 Workstation

Every keyboard has it's moment as the "flagship" of the product line. There was a version of the XP-50 with more keys, the XP-80, but essentially this represented the state of the art in Roland "romplers" (ROM sample playback synths) in 1995.

MAYBE I'M CHEAP because I rarely buy gear when it's brand new. But something else was coming out so the XP-50 was on sale for about $500 by 1998 or 1999 or so. My midi studio was getting out of hand, with lots of modules and drum machines, a big mixer and tons of cables. I was spending half my time getting all the bank change and program change messages right in my computer sequencer, and laboring over saving all the various drum patterns and program setups or my modules. Trading all that for this "workstation" seemed like a great way to consolidate, and I knew it sounded really nice, having spent many a lunch break in Sam Ash.

The store's advertising claimed that an expansion card was included, but after I'd plunked down my credit card and the expansion card wasn't appearing on the counter, I complained. Loudly. The salesman was on his first day and couldn't find a record of the special deal anywhere. I was insistent, because I knew I was right, and didn't want to get ripped off. Finally, he looked both ways and threw the card in the bag saying, "O.K. just take it, go!"

MY MISSION was being served: to move away from a spaghetti of cables and the complexity of being nursemaid to a dozen tiny LCD screens in the direction of writing good songs and capturing great performances.

I was simplifying, getting back the music.

OR SO I THOUGHT. While the XP-50 had a great soundset, a nice feel and all that expandability, it was not exactly simple to use well. It required lots of button pushing to program new sounds and get around the sequencer and to program patches on-board.

Also, the 64 voice polyphony was very easily eaten up by a few tracks, because a lot of sounds used up to 4 voices. Play your biggest chord and do the math. Pretty pointless to have a 16 track sequencer with so few voices.

CONCLUSION: I loved this keyboard anyway because of the variety of patches. I wish I'd never sold it a few years later in favor of the VST synths my computer was too sluggish to take full advantage of inside Cubase VST. In addition, I wish I'd not gotten rid of some of the other modules because they could have provided some expanded polyphony.

I think the sounds are still good today. Mangle them with your recording software. In 2008 I'd tell folks on somewhat of a budget (read: can't buy a $4000 tricked out mac with a quad processor) to record straight audio on a more basic machine and not worry about the ever increasing horsepower you need to run more than a couple of virtual instruments. Instead, buy one of these or it's rack-mount siblings (jv1080 jv1010 or later models) used and you'll have thousands of sounds ready to go.

OH YEA, When I got home from the store with my XP-50, I looked it up and actually the price with the included card was from another store, and a hundred bucks more.

Roland SPD-6

Back in 1985 or so, Gary Bettum and I (you out there somewhere Gary?) worked together at a midtown recording studio called ERAS. We were helping to build a little room, and when it was done, the first piece of gear we put in was a set of Simmons synth drums. Very 80s.

The Simmons bass drum was a huge hexagonal pad, about as tall as an actual bass drum. We got to thinking about how there was no reason for the size. It could just as well be a tiny area big enough for only the beater ball to strike. Soon we fantasized about a suitcase sized drum trigger unit with some rubber pads that could fire off drum sounds like the Simmons, but be really portable.

Well, of course we were right, that would be cool, and soon enough, may companies started to make our dream come true. The Linn drum was out, and then you had the Akai MPC triggering samples and redefining music production. These days I own the very capable Triggerfinger, and any number of tiny controllers are on the market. But for a while, it was just the Octapad, and eventually this, it's baby brother, the SPD-6. I got one, mainly because it was so cheap, a few hundred bucks.

6 pads and internal samples. Tough enough to play with sticks, and sensitive enough to play with your fingers (it had a sensitivity switch). It was cool. Especially if you really knew how to play the drums. I finally had my suitcase-sized drum kit, ready to throw into a bag and take anywhere.

It had some limitations, however. First of all there was no midi in. So you couldn't trigger its sounds from midi data. You could trigger your sampler from it, and program midi tracks. But you couldn't use use it as a midi playback unit. The sound set was small, only 113 samples.

If only they had bundled more of a variety of sounds and a drum machine in there. As it was it was just a bit too limited to really compete. It was soon discontinued.

Maybe a full kit of V-drums can be played with some body-feel, but listening back, I couldn't tell the difference between drum parts I programed on this unit and the ones created on a piano-style midi keyboard.

On to ebay it went, and in turn I purchased a drum machine with tons more sounds and over the top programing possibilities and full midi capability: the Boss DR-770.