I’m sure everyone remembers going to an actual recording studio for the very first time!
I’m 34 now. I was 13 then. I was pretty excited about it. It was with a ministry group, that at the time had some pretty decent backers. My mom embarrassingly enough, took a bunch of pictures, but I’m glad she did. Its crazy looking back through the photos and recognizing the gear the guy had on his rack. And his console. The group practiced for months going in there, and we recorded on adats.
I think the group ran out of money. As fas as I know, those recordings never got published. But I do remember being pretty captivated by how much attention was put into the mining and tuning of the drums. How the singer laid a scratch vocal with an sm58. The guitar was run direct. I’ll try to remember to add some of those pictures if I can find them
I recently recorded a church singer who was a nervous wreck coming in to record. She was a great girl and a terrific singer. But had a tough time getting acclimated to the environment. Its sooooo different for everyone! It made reminisce on my first time.
I was 34. I’d never recorded anything. I wish someone had gotten pix. I was a nervous wreck BUT the drummer, rhythm guitarist, and myself (bass) got the foundation of the song recorded in one take. The vocals took me a few takes. It was an exciting and surreal experience for me.
The hardest thing for me the first time was getting used to how different everything sounded through cans vs. live performance. You couldn’t just move a foot or two to find the sweet spot, and it made me very self conscious about playing. It also seemed to make it harder to swing with the drums and bass, since everyone was very conscious of their time. The second time, we all realized that was a useless approach and got a lot better by making it more like live.
Wow, I had never really thought back to this, your message brought me memories I thought were lost
I was one half of a two guys band at that time, I think I was 22 or so. Even then I was interested in recording and mixing as much as in actually playing music, so having the opportunity to play and record in a professional studio (although it wasn’t a famous one) was hugely exciting for me.
We had only one song to record with no vocals, we did it all in one night. I had some simple keyboard parts to play so even though I was not at my best level of concentration (considering I was constantly looking at the recording gear and the what the engineer was doing at the console) it was done easily. I recall having insisted on playing the hi-hat line with an actual instrument because playing drums (at least part of it) on a record was a fantasy of mine, but my timing was substandard and we ended up using a sampled loop.
I remember being somewhat surprised at the ease with which the recording engineer offered to have a break and smoke a joint, too.
I was only able to go back in a professional studio for a couple more occasions, but they are all great memories.
By the way this very first song that we recorded was released as a part of the OST of Sofia Coppola’s “Lost In Translation”, in case you’re curious (starts at 4:19):
Now that I listen to this again I realize that the mixing was kind of substandard too, with so much boominess on the guitar part (sweet little personal revenge ).
I was worried about performance, mostly if I got to the mixing board too quickly. There was this microphone that I was supposed to touch in just the right way, that causes the recording to really explode with wet sound. I twiddled that knob a bit and then I pulled out of the studio.
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