Let's Make A Racket - XI

Prehistoric …

Quick recap:
A few weeks back, in a sealed-up box lurking in an unexplored backwater of my attic, I found over a hundred tapes that I thought were lost decades ago; tapes of Old Dive dicking around in various bands and studios and even stuff recorded back at school (on wax cylinder and clay tablet).

You've endured some of the school stuff; now here's one of the first things I recorded when I got hold of an old Tascam Porta 02, 4-track cassette recorder, known back in the Cretaceous Period as a "portastudio".

Sheesh! Even typing that word takes me way, way back in geological time.

This was my very first home studio set-up, from around the early 1980s, I think.
Starting at the far end (this is gonna get soooo boring) are a bunch of reverbs and EQs, then the portastudio; the whitish thing is a classic Roland TR 505 drum machine and in front of that is the Boss Dr. Rhythm beat box that I think is being used on this track. Then there's a DI box sitting on a Marshall preamp and an old analogue chorus rack unit. Under the desk is a spring reverb box, my old wah-wah pedal and a stomp-box compressor.
A more primitive recording set up could not be found for love nor money, but it was quite advanced back then.

This is what is currently cluttering up one of the spare bedrooms.
Boys, eh? We grow old but we never grow up.
And yes, I still have those ratty old drum machines. I like retro crap.
These days I use Lexicon reverbs though, because I discovered that you get what you pay for.

Many apologies for the quality of this crappy little recording, but it's been sitting in a box in several different attics for decades and so has lost a lot of its clarity; in fact the guitar track almost completely cuts out for a couple of beats somewhere in the middle.

Before I learned to programme the drum machine (you know how it is: get the thing out of the box and play with it; who bothers with reading the manual?), it seems I just set it to play a dull, thudding plod of a rhythm, added a very basic bass and rhythm guitar track and then just improvised a load of bluesy tosh over the top.

This one has "Vindaloo Blue" written on the case, so I must have recorded it after losing a fight with a particularly vicious curry (Don't let the bottom fall out of your world; have a vindaloo and let the world fall out of your bottom).
It seems I played it straight through, making it up as I went along; one part clean channel, one part overdriven channel on the Marshall and then some embarrassingly corny twatting about at the end where I overdubbed a second guitar part (oh, dear).

This must have been one of the first things I recorded as I was obviously too impatient to bother with a decent backing track or indeed to do any more than one take.

So … I've had to suffer it; now it's your turn.
Vindaloo Blue.



If anyone wants to listen to something a tad less amateurish, here are links to Dive's Thursday Rackets to date:


I - Parisienne Walkway.

II - Cold, Cold Feeling.

III - Can't Be Satisfied.

IV - Love That Burns.

V - Too Many Monkeys In My Tree.

VI - Mama t'Ain't Long 'fore Day.

VII - Sessie Mae.

VIII - Ballad Of An Elder Woman.

IX - Rio de Janeiro Blues.

X - The Thrill Is Gone.

Judging by that lot, goodness knows what next week will hold.