Josie (a song!)

In the early ’80s, I got my hands on my first multi-track recorder: a Teac 4-channel reel-to-reel tape recorder.

To learn how to use the damn thing — nothing about it was obvious! — I wrote and recorded a simple blues tune called “Josie.” It was on the fly, so the first-draft lyrics were lame, and the arrangement wasn’t much better.

But I learned a lot recording that song — how to mic a guitar, how monitor previous tracks while overdubbing, how to bounce tracks to make room for more overdubs. I learned how to mic an acoustic guitar, and how not to record an electric. (Later, I learned how to turn my bathroom into a reverb chamber.)

Most important: I learned how to commit to a decision and accept the results. Once I’d bounce the tracks, I was stuck with it. I learned to move on and make it work.

Apart from the bathroom-reverb thing, all those things proved foundational as I moved up from 4 tracks to 8, to 16, to 24. I moonlighted as a recording engineer for awhile, sometimes even getting paid, which was fairly unusual for small-time engineers. But I was never an expert; I was always making things up as I went along.

Over the last few months, I’ve been dabbling in music again, coming face-to-face with how much I’ve forgotten. It’s kicking my ass, in all the best ways.

Tech is amazing now. There’s Cakewalk, for example: it’s a Digital Audio Workstation (basically a computer program exponentially more powerful than than my old multi-track recorder), with all the quality and features of DAWs the pros use. Indeed, many professionals use Cakewalk. And it’s free — no limits, no demo mode, no bait-and-switch. If your computer can handle it, Cakewalk will do it.

There are programs that integrate into Cakewalk– unbelievably realistic instruments, or audio effects of amazing quality. Many of them are also free.

And then there’s YouTube, full of people spending their lives providing helpful, often high-quality reviews and demos and training for all these tools — not to mention actual, live instruments. I’ve learned more about the guitar in the last few months than I ever did when I was a serious guitarist.

It’s a golden age for people who want to make music.

So I dusted off “Josie,” using it to find my way around Cakewalk and its ecosystem. And, as was true with that old Teac so long ago, I learned a lot — mostly how much I’ve forgotten, but also how much I never learned in the first place.

It’s pretty cool.

If you’re interested, check out “Josie.” It’s not bad, considering it was primarily a learning opportunity.

[Updated 6/23/21: I embedded the song from Soundcloud.]

Both images are from the manual for the TEAC A-2340, which is the machine I had way back when.