Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

A long time ago (late 60's) I tried my hand at some home recordings on a piece of equipment that you don't see anymore. My Dad had in his den, an old Dictation-transcribing machine that recorded the sound on plastic disks. It was big and boxy and looked like something from out of the 50's! Anyways, he had a couple of boxes of extra blank disks so I figured I would do a little recording. I set up the machine in the bathroom, for the echo, and recruited my younger brother and a pal(Fred)to help with the instrumentation. With Fred and me on acoustic guitars and my brother on wooden rhythm blocks, we churned out a bunch of stuff. Dad sure was ****** that we went through about 35 disks but at least we didn't wreck the machine. I think he was surprised that we could even figure out how to use it! End result: Lo-fidelity and pretty sad! Three disks came out good and somewhat listenable. It's probably because of these 3 that my Dad didn't totally put the screws to me. We did Slim Dusty's - Waltzing Matilda, Frank Ifield's - I Remember You (Fred played harmonica!) and Trini Lopez's version of La Bamba. ....(ahh, those were the days!) ---Skip.

Welcome to the forum Skipson. Oh, the days of experimenting eh. I tried with a couple of cassette recorders, bouncing back & forth, but two passes & it was unlistenable to.

Your experiment seems very inventive though...

I still have a tape of my old band from around 1973. Someone knew someone with a stereo cassette recorder with microphone inputs, and we borrowed that for a practice night. One microphone (cheapo vocal mics of the time) was wrapped up in a blanket and put near the drums and bass, the other mic was just somewhere it could pick up the rest of us. Quality, no - fun, yes!