Today is a milestone for me. I’m finally selling my first analog tape-based setup, and I thought I’d post the pics here for posterity. Sometimes it’s easy to forget our roots amidst all our shiny toys…

This is a Teac A-3440 4-track recording deck and a Teac 2A mixer. This particular setup was the equipment on which I recorded my first real project that eventually got pressed to vinyl (a small blues band recorded in Denton, Texas during my sophomore year in college, around 1981). Over the next 25 years, I recorded everything from choirs to jazz bands to country-and-western groups to synth-pop ensembles. Most of the master tapes were spun off to Logic and/or Pro Tools years ago, but some are still around (somewhere).

The A-3440 was a great deck with a great headstack, and I used a Teac RX-9 dbx unit later on for noise reduction (young people have no appreciation for tape hiss). The whole setup weighs quite a bit and wasn’t all that portable, so I have to chuckle when I think about how I show up now with my laptop, audio interface, and mics in a couple of small bags.

As a way of tying this in here on Sacred Loops, this deck was used during some church productions to play back pre-recorded band and choir tracks (tracks 1-3) and send a click to the live band during performance (track 4). We recorded the click onto track four using a Roland DR-55 and played it back through a headphone amp matrix that I built one summer. We were using click tracks for live performance as far back as 1981!

Here are a couple of close up pictures of the mixer and deck:

The mixer is 6-in/4-out and doesn’t even have XLR inputs (we used matching transformers instead), but it does have a 4-channel bussing system as well as direct outs and buss ins. Quite advanced for it’s time and certainly nothing like what had previously been available to the consumer market at that price point.

The whole setup was probably around $4,500 in 1979, and I am forever grateful to my parents for loaning me the money to buy the setup (while I was still in high school). It took a few months of recording sessions with local bands to pay them back, and I’ll never forget the day I paid it off free and clear.

Thanks for walking down memory lane with me!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at 12:48 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.