TALKIN’ BOUT HIS GENERATION
I was 16 when I got my first guitar. My brother was 14 and got a drum kit. Every time we watched Nirvana: Live! Tonight! Sold Out!! on VHS we’d be inspired to go make a noise. Actually seeing it being done was rare, as there was no MTV yet, in our house at least. We used to record stuff to a mono cassette deck. To ‘overdub’ we’d play that recording in the room and play something else over it and record that onto a second tape deck! No such recording has survived, nor has the tape deck, but you can imagine how good it sounded… Over the years I have had a few recording devices, but never managed to record music without going to a studio with whatever band I was in at the time.
Fast-forward nearly 30 years and my 14-year-old son has YouTube for infinite inspiration, is at Grade 6 on guitar, owns a bass guitar, plus a really nice Roland electronic drum kit. For his 14th birthday he got a Focusrite interface and with a little help from me managed to suss out how to record it all into GarageBand on his iPad. Less than 24 hours after the final piece fell into place he had recorded his first track.
I am soooo proud, not least because it’s really good, with elements of Mogwai and Metallica, but because he has made the best use of the technology at his disposal and combined it with the considerable talent he has at his disposal. I guess that is exactly what me and my brother were trying to do with the tape decks. Now all I need to do is persuade him to play drums while I record all my hitherto undocumented songs…
David Dallas, via email Many thanks for sharing, David. We’ve often said that if our 15-year-old selves could see the kit that’s cheaply and easily available these days we’d be flabbergasted. Similar to your experience, we spent hours fiddling with four-track PortaStudios and dreaming about being able to go ‘into a studio’ to make a professional recording. Egg boxes on the walls of the garage were standard issue and if you wanted to learn how a solo of a famous song went you’d have to get down the local music shop and buy the TAB – or use your ears and try to figure it out. By comparison, players starting out today have some fantastic aids to learning. However, there are good and bad points to everything. We remember interviewing Alex Lifeson once as he explained how listening again and again to Cream records – trying to nail Clapton’s solo – really trained his ears. Likewise, many of the greatest recordings of all time were made on just two or four tracks. As we are given ever more power to realise our creative dreams, it’s important remember that sometimes restrictions force us to be more ingenious and, yes, creative in getting the results we want.