The Making of Trip Note
The idea of a career retrospective started to take shape with the transfer of my 8 track tapes to Cubase in the fall of 2014. By archiving and getting some of that stuff into my computer, I was able to discover some things I didn’t know I had, remix others and add to some. As the next few years wore on, and with the start of my Podcast ‘Live From the inSync Asylum’, Trip Note: 1978-2018 started to come into focus. So here we are 7 years later, and Trip Note is done and released. It’s now 4 double albums featuring 66 songs and over 5 hours of music, nearly all of which have never been released before, or heard in the versions on the albums.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that even I was in my prime at one time. And in this collections 40-year-span, 1980-1995 was a particularly productive stretch, and largely unavailable until the release of Trip Note.
I drew upon all the media I have access to – half-inch and quarter-inch Reel-to-Reel tapes, Dat Tapes, Cassette Tapes, Old Mixes and backups on CD and Disc Drives. The challenge was trying to find a reasonably consistent sound quality. Anything that could be remixed, was. The original recordings were of all kinds of quality, including pretty bad quality! But as they say – it is was it is. I know this collection is really for me – If I want to hear something old – it will now be easier to find and with a consistent high quality sound. The first few years of my recordings were done using a pretty primitive setup. I had a cassette deck, a mic, some cables and some kind of splitter box from Radio Shack. I then started borrowing cassette decks from my friends, and bouncing tracks back and forth between them. The noise builds up with that method, but I got some music out of it. It would be years later before I actually had a reverb unit, but the earliest recordings use my old Fender Twin Reverb amp or an old Traynor PA mixer head for reverb. I guess my original monitoring situation was my stereo at the time or headphones –don’t remember. Not sure when direct recording started – probably when I got a Tascam 4 Track and a Teac Mixer. That later became an 8 Track Tascam 38, and an 18 channel Ramsa mixer.
My use of computers and sequencers started in the early 90’s, when my friend and keyboard player Doug Ortega lent me an old IBM DOS machine to run early versions of Cakewalk. That led to SMTPE time code and syncing the PC to 8 track. I think it was 98/99 when I switched to Logic Audio and recording audio to disc for the first time. It’s been that way ever since…
Check out the Trip Note category, for my individual posts and comments on different songs and the four volumes, as well as recent podcasts. Also be sure to check out Trip Note in the store. Enjoy!
Trip Note: 1978-2018 Vol. 4 Links https://bit.ly/3xBMG92
Trip Note: 1978-2018 Vol. 3 Links https://bit.ly/36LOaSZ
Trip Note: 1978-2018 Vol. 2 Links https://bit.ly/3v3fdTD
Trip Note: 1978-2018 Vol. 1 - Links https://bit.ly/2RO5PW8