My first experience in a recording studio was a modest failure. I can remember the engineer saying "this is a pretty normal mix for this type of music." Right, normal, that's exactly what we're aiming for. I'm still surprised he bothered to pretend he knew what "type" of music we were making. Unless "shitty" can be considered a genre.
But we weren't completely without merit. We played our instruments passably well for 16 and 17 year olds with one exception. Our drummer Jason played the drums like a drunken octopus, and happened to be 25 at that time.
We borrowed all the nicest gear we could get our hands on-- which ultimately wasn't that nice: A Randall 4x12, my Dad's silver face dual showman, a yamaha bass etc. Unfortunately we didn't know that having 3 year old drum heads would affect our sound so adversely.
But hey, this was 2" tape mixed down on a large format console, this was going to sound great.
Except it didn't.
Then the engineer accused us of stealing his smokes. And all trust was lost. This was when I started to become suspicious of the word "pro."
"Pro" seemed to imply working knowledge of the production techniques employed by Journey and not much else.
Eventually we started recording with a friend who owned an ADAT joint when that shit was brand new. After a few sessions there we realized that something was wrong with the sound of his Mackie/Alesis combo. So we rented a room, bought a 1/2" 8 track and a Tascam board and set out on our own.
Now I'm not saying the Tascam sounded better than the mackie-- it just sounded different. I think we were inordinately attached to that board-- probably because it was brown with orange knobs--a combination of notable aesthetic genius.
We recorded ourselves a lot, and we recorded other bands. We hit the tape really hot. Nothing sounded that great but it sounded different enough from the ADAT guy that we started to win his more critical clients.
Then I got older and moved around a lot.
I got into DAW recording in 1999 because it was compact and affordable and because (like many people at that time) I was under the influence of OK Computer and had vague ideas about pastiche and/or musique concrete.
So these days I'm back home in CA, recording various projects.
In February I started playing with some old Friend's here's the website:
http://thedyingcalifornian.com/We're currently tracking our next record.