Stuck restoring old crap? A sad tale of woe begins.

I found the tapes in a cardboard box tucked underneath the mudroom stairs. A box with 8 Ampex 456 1" tapes with dates ranging from 1986 to 1988. My technical notes were written on the tape boxes and the song titles were scribbled on stickers on the reels.

I should have soaked them with butane and burnt them.

Unfortunately other band members were aware of the existence of these tapes. We now had to find a working 16 track 1" tape recorder and transfer the contents to digital. We eventually did.

Within the first 10 seconds of hearing The Mountain it was obvious the recording should have been abandoned. The instruments and vocals were jammed into one octave and it wasn't immediately obvious which tracks the drums were on. Not a good sign. After several passes with each track soloed it started to become clear what the instrument assignments were. It also became clear that this one song would probably take 200 or more hours to fix. This brings us to Rule#1 - when in doubt do it again.

Some things can't be fixed in the mix. For example you won't find an "unreverb" or "de-echo" button anywhere in software. If the guitarist left the amp's reverb on just record it again. Unfortunately the vocalist, one guitarist and the drummer were not available. Fuck.

We look nothing like the attached picture.

#songwriting #music #recording