Artifacts of the past world.

I quite literally came across a pile of what could be called true "basement tapes" over the weekend. I used to have a four track recorder, some musical instruments, and some spare time. I filled up a good bit of that time noodling around with the four track. And not really noodling, unless you do noodling with all the subtlety of hammering a nail while wearing oven mitts.

You see, back in times of yore, before I moved to the District, I was a school teacher just out of college and like most school teachers, I had the summers off. Being young and somewhat attached to my hometown and a woman I knew there, I would move back in with my parents over the summer, take a very limited hours day job, and sit around in the basement most of the day with all this musical equipment. In the evenings I would play basketball and/or drink.

That, my friends, is a lifestyle that can only be lived for so long before it either becomes impractical or very very sad. Except for the basketball part.

Anyway, I created dozens of utterly horrific songs during this time -- and like children's art, it's really about the process not the product. I used a Doctor Rhythm drum machine (DR-550 I believe; I don't have it anymore) and would painstakingly program it for the entire length of the song, and I didn't settle for simple pattern repetitions either. Most songs required around 20 patterns -- a high hat added here, maybe an extra cymbal crash, a few drum rolls -- so it didn't sound completely like a metronome.

The most stressful thing about the entire recording process was adding the vocal track. I've never liked my voice and find it relatively impossible to carry a tune, so I would conduct my vocal sessions in as much secrecy as possible. I would wait until the house was empty (not an easy prospect given my parents were both teachers who had summers off and my two siblings were younger and had summers off as well) and then feverishly record take after take trying to get something I could live with, if not like.

Unfortunately, I never figured out the mixing part of it, and it always sounded like the vocals were sitting on top of everything else, sort of the way it sounds with Karaoke, or if you're singing directly into a boom-box microphone with the radio running in the background. Still, the tapes were fun to make and gave me a good creative outlet.

Most of them can't be listened to properly now, since the four track is now with my cousin in Florida (along with the microphone, drum machine, and various other odds and ends), but I did find a few mix downs and a I was listening to them last night. A few things struck me:

1. As clunky and poorly made as they are, I was doing things with the guitar that I didn't realize I could do (I'm not talking Clapton here, I'm talking single picked notes rather than constant strumming -- I am not a good guitar player).
2. My voice isn't so much the problem as my total tone deafness is.
3. I never threw out anything.

Memory lane is getting pretty damn crowded these days.