Back some years, when we moved from Germany to Canada, it was the year 1984, I’ve decided to get going with my dream; new life, new country, new dream… This dream was to have my own recording studio.
Well, I knew it will take time and lots of money but I wanted at least to give it a start kick. And what should be the first thing to make recordings? A couple of microphones, and a recording equipment.
I started with the recording eq., and bought a wonderful reel to reel machine, a pro speed (38) Tandberg beauty. I even ordered it for Canada, so it was made for 120 volts at 60 Hz and was ready to go with our shipment with all what we had those days. The Mics came a bit later, when we visited back in Austria. Well, that was actually a story: we ordered to the address of relatives in Vienna but it didn’t come on time before we left the city. However, we had a short, about ten minutes stopover at the Vienna West Station on our way back from Budapest to Germany, so they gave us the mics, actually when the train was already moving!
Of course, condenser mics don’t work just out of the box, I had to get some pre-amplification. I wasn’t familiar with available equipment those days, and I though well, I will perhaps need more than only two channels anyway, so I’ve got a Yamaha 8 tracks very basic mixer also.
The first two years in Canada were quite “stormy”, started in Toronto for one year, having all the possible gigs there, and then moving to Winnipeg, (making twice the 2400Km trip) so the real start of recordings were in 1986. Not having a decent studio room, I was going to the various venues of the Universities and my first real studio I built years later later, in Saskatoon, on our backyard.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last very long working analogue because of the arrival of digital audio. It was way too attractive to change to digital, having allready those days tremendous possibilities to manipulate the digital audio. The last few analogue “attempts” I made somewhere at the beginning of the 90’s when we moved to Japan and soon after I’ve got my first digital setup, the first Digidesign with the first decent Mac that could handle it.
Now, after more than 30 years and moving around many times included a few transcontinental ones, I had to decide to either move again with the reel to reel or get rid of it. With some sadness I’ve decided for the second choice and now it has a new owner since a few weeks.
This guy was obviously very happy that I gave him also the quite a few Maxell tapes with many hours of recordings on them, and he digitalized all of it, sending on CD’s to me.
Most of these recordings aren’t very good any more, curiously the pro broadcast recordings are the worse, but there was one session for a showcase that was really nicely conserved.
I did convert all to Pro Tools and made couple of pieces with a bit of cosmetics, just for fun, and uploaded to my YouTube channel.
The rest won’t be available for public because the sound quality is unfortunately not good enough.
The two pieces are Bazzini: La Ronde Des Lutins, and Novacek: Perpetuum Mobile, recorded in Winnipeg at the University of Winnipeg, violin my self and piano Kevin Fitz-Gerald.
Here the videos: