Nail Soup

Listening to a 6 Music kind-of-documentory .... it's a show of the all time John Peel Festive Fifty... condensed into one hour... a clip of the music and a clip of Peel for each song. Based on a all-time FF he did in his later years. Lots of good stuff in there (so far.. I'm about halfway) although, as Peel himself laments, a bit predictable........ but here is the opener from the show.

I’m not buying his story either😃!

Siouxsie and the Banshees 1978 debut album "The Scream". Sample track - Metal Postcard Drummer Kenny Morris was not a technically gifted drummer like his successor (Budgie), but did come up with simple but effective but effective drum parts.... like this. Guitarist John McKay was not such a technically gifted guitarist as his (eventual) successor (John McGeoch) but did some great stuff and had one of the all-time great guitar sounds IMO. Of course they did great stuff with great drumming in the Budgie era too!

Great song.... however in my case it met my already high expectations😄!

Good day today..... day off work, long country/canal cycle ride... dinner on the canal bank followed by a canal-side lie down in the sun with Augustus Pablo in the earphones 😀.

Like it, definitely my bag.... any idea if he's a dubbing up existing songs or recording from scratch or what?

I was a bit niaive back then, didn't know much about noise reduction..... probably associated Dolby with Audiophiles etc to be honest. I was always working alone really...... 4-track was a solo activity, never collaborated so even less chance to exchange ideas about NR and so on. And no internet or Basschat either! In practice I only ever did one bounce per song, and tape noise was not the limiting factor in my recordings anyway! Some of the recordings ending up sounding good in a noisy lo-fi way. Others sounded the bad kind of lo-fi!

My parents had no musical ability or knowledge to pass on. They had records, but were not enthusiasts. However, they were very encouraging of my music (or any other interest for that matter) They bought me my original gear (Kay bass) but I never learned how to play it.... I just was not in the right place then. Later I bought my own bass and taught myself the basics. From then on they have been really supportive..... knowing all my early band-mates by name (when your band was more like your gang) , helping with lifts to gigs, mum listening to my Crass-inspired lyrics(!), coming to gigs to hear the band.... and even in more recent years coming to the odd open mic I did or covers gig my current band has. My brother was getting into making music at the same time, so we exchanged notes, and eventually co-owned a fostex fourtrack. In our late -twenties me and my brother formed an originals band togther. Lasted a couple of years and we have our demo tape as a kind of family heirloom! Finally in the last year I have managed to teach my mum 3 chords on the ukulele (C,F,G of course)!

I think most folk have posted their comments now. So @scalpy what is your your verdict/thoughts?

Inspired by a couple of posts in the "Notable Deaths" thread, and following on from the "Did music lessons at school help with your musical life?" thread. In the notable deaths thread one poster had great support and musical knowledge from their (sadly departed) father. A responder said that they (sadly) got no support whatsoever for music or indeed anything else from their father☹️. What's your story?

It’s how the early left-handers were made !

I think I didn’t use any noise reduction though. It was a long time ago though.

Culture - Lion Rock

I'm going to 'press pause' while i figure out what to do next... thanks to you guys I have some options to consider including: - Repair the tape transport (I may not have the skills for doing that myself, but I'll try) so might need to pay - Buy a 4-track off e.g. e-bay and sell it after. - Get Fostex repaired professionally (the transport and the original audio output problem), and then sell it afterwards to re-coop the repair fees (Fostex is part-owned with my brother, so I'll split the proceeds with him. He lives abroad now and has probably assumed it has been disposed of by now!) - Kind offer to utilize a Basschatter's 4-track (but my DAW is tied to a desktop PC) - Have the tapes transferred professionally (Maybe sell the broken Fostex for spares to fund it?) Most of the option mean i'd need to upgrade my audio interface to 4 channels at least temporarily.

Oops being a bit silly there- thanks for the warning. I’ll find an old tape !!!

The Zoom model I have can only take 2 inputs at a time, otherwise that would have worked pretty well!

Step 4 - power up / tape transport Good news :Powered up ok👍 ! Bad news: tape mechanism not working well. 😟. I put the tape in and tried to rewind....... it rewound pretty slow, got slower and stopped. The sprocket (?) goes round ok without the tape there. When I rewind the tape with a pencil it seems loose enough. Cannot play... the heads go to the tape, but there is just a horrible eerrrrrrrrrrr noise. any ideas?

(Dog walked, back to cassette activity!) Step 3 - choose a cassette This looks like a good one, bringing back memories!

Step 2 - power supply More digging around in the loft, and I have the Fostex power supply. Its pretty heavy, the power supply alone weighs a lot more than the Zoom 4 track device which superseded the Fostex!

Step 1 - leads dug around and managed to find four channels worth of phono to jack lead. No purchase required, so good so far.

Wow thats a really kind offer!!!.... Im going to see if I can get the buss signals out of the (partly broken) original Fostex first...... but if that fails.........??

Ok, really geting started on this now. Just for fun, and in case anyone is interested, and in case anyone can help along the way with tips, I'll do a kind of diary in here. Lets see how it goes !!

Looks a bit Prince?

BBC 6 music are celbrating 50 years of the "Paranoid" Album today.

Thanks for the continued tips. I will try at the weekend to get some signal out of the Buss sockets to my existing audio interface DAW which has only two channels. I'll record two tracks to DAW as a kind of proof of concept. But based on your advice, I won't do it in multiple takes. If it works, I'll obtain a (budget) four-channel audio interface and use that to do all four tracks at once. It's been a long time since I used the recorder, the adiochain is broken somewhere (hopefully before the Buss outs) and I have never used the buss channels - so wish me luck!