Topher home recording studio, Part 2: High school musical.
My home recording journey starts in 1980s: 4-track cassettes from my smalltown Alberta bedroom
High school home studio
1989–91
Irma, Alberta (my bedroom) and
Rainier, Alberta (which I dubbed Golden Top Studios)
I grew up immersed in music performance. I was marching in the high school band my dad directed since the time I was in kindergarten, and I had started taking piano lessons by the time I was in Grade 4. These, plus my uncle’s home studio at my grandparents’ potato farm, created a rich musical world for me to grow up in.
I was fanatical about listening to music, and watching CBC’s Good Rockin’ Tonight and Video Hits via ‘farmer vision’ TV.
Passion for music + quiet rural town = buckets of time for exploring my parents’ record collection, making mix tapes, and organizing my school friends into air band performances. And while fun, that performing was always someone else’s stuff. It wasn’t until high school that I began looking at music as something I could create.
Both my uncle and my dad helped fuel this exploration. My uncle would lend me old keyboards he wasn’t using anymore, and my dad would let me use his high school band program’s instruments at home. My hometown of Irma is tiny, population 400, with really no other musicians around to form a non-air band with, so I spent my time very passionately pounding out “Subdivisions” by Rush and “When It’s Love” by Van Halen, alone in my bedroom, running borrowed synths through a second-hand home stereo stystem. But as the months went on, I started wondering about recording my own ideas, and the more I played with it, the more I got hooked.
It was new, fascinating and exploratory — just getting the feet wet in the shallow end. When you combine these musical tools with a keen curiosity, boredom and isolation of living in a small prairie town, and some teenage heartache…
BOY: (blushing) I wrote this song for you.
GIRL: “Um, it’s… hmm, it’s OK. I guess. But why is it so sad sounding? And not have any words? And why is it so long?”
BOY: (crushed heart) It is?
… you had the beginnings of a creative life.
There were no online tutorials or YouTube videos to explain how to record or write songs. There was no online. There was no YouTube.
So I taught myself, mostly, by trial and error. It was play, not work, and I’m sure that’s what made it work. The number of hours and my love of it combined to make it something I would get pretty good at in the years to come.
But at the beginning, a couple of key pieces of gear and one chance meeting in Grade 12 pushed the creative me off a scary cliff and down the journey I’m still on today.
These two pieces of gear are what I learned everything from: the Ensoniq SQ-80 synthesizer, and the Fostex 260 4-track cassette recorder.
Two pieces of gear that changed my life
The Ensoniq SQ-80 (which itself was basically an upgraded version of a popular American synth from the ’80s called the ESQ-1) was one of a new breed of synthesizers in and around 1990 called a workstation. They still make them, although with computer recording being so great now they’re less popular. A workstation combined a synthesizer with a wide range of sounds, including drums, and a MIDI sequencer which let you record those sounds into your own songs.
The Korg M1 was the famous workstation at the time, and was in another league from the Ensoniq in terms of sound quality and effects, but it was actually much better for me to learn recording on the Ensoniq. The SQ-80 couldn’t touch the M1 in the quality of its acoustic sounds, such as piano and saxophone, and did not have internal effects such as reverb or delay. But it was still capable of making some good analog-sounding synth sounds, and its true strengths were a user friendly synth engine for learning the basics of sound programming, and more importantly, had a MIDI sequencer that was incredibly simple to learn as a high school newbie.
It was an eight-track MIDI recorder that you could use to record and play back songs with up to eight different built-in instrument sounds at once, or use any of those eight tracks to drive notes on other keyboards you could connect using MIDI cables. The crucial thing for me was that the sequencer was pattern-based, or what was at the time called “drum machine style” sequencer. Instead of recording a song as one long, linear piece, like recording to tape, you created little musical segments— say, a 4-bar piece of music for an intro, another 4-bar segment for a verse, and a different 4-bar piece for a chorus— and then chained those patterns together in the right order in order to make a full song.
That made things infinitely easier for me to learn. To this day, I hate using linear sequencers that won’t let you link loops and patterns together to create full songs.
The Fostex 260 was a four-track cassette recorder. These kinds of recorders, starting with the original Tascam Portastudio, were a liberation for any aspiring songwriter or home recording neophyte.
It’s not an overstatement to say they were revolutionary in their day. Instead of using big reel-to-reel tape machines, which could set you back $20–30,000 plus $200–300 per reel of new tape, you could have a simple 4-track machine for less than $1,000, and it used blank chrome cassettes you could get in any local music or department store for $5 or less. Today you can record unlimited audio tracks on the cheapest of computers and free open source software, and you have more studio capability on your iPhone than we could have dreamed of in 1990. But at that time, the cassette portastudio was a godsend.
It also happened to be a great way to learn about home recording — a super convenient, hands-on school kit in a box that fit under your arm. It combined a simple mixer, including mic preamps and basic EQ, with a tape recorder that could multitrack (so you could record drums on Track 1, rewind, and record singing on Track 2 while keeping the drums that were on Track 1, and so on).
When your masterpiece was done, you could record your mixes out onto a regular cassette and play it in your truck, or on a friend’s ghetto blaster, or in your Walkman. “Woah!! It’s…my music!” That is an extremely important emotional experience as a songwriter — to hear music you created from nothing suddenly coming to life in real world contexts, alongside actual “real” music done by professionals and stars and heroes. It’s an empowering moment: “I can make songs of my own that sound just as good as ones on the radio.” Talk about exciting.
So a synth workstation with an easy-to-use MIDI sequencer, and a cassette 4-track recorder with built-in mixer. Tactile, simple, tangible. That’s how everything started. And that’s when I met some friends who gave me the excuse to put that gear to work.
Joining a band, Straight Outta Wainwright…
During this time, in my Grade 12 year, I accidentally became the producer of a rap group with two high school friends Ryan and Glen. Basically, they were huge music fans too, and when I found out they were experimenting with making music, I wanted in. We were like the Beastie Boys of Wainwright.
By this time I had some more of my uncle’s cast-off music gear, including an Oberheim DMX drum machine and a Yamaha DX-7. I could wire it all into the Fostex recorder and invent backing tracks under the artistic direction and feedback of all three of us, collectively known as W5, then Beyond Belief (more on this later). We had a blast making our own songs that were certainly terrible, but we were so thrilled to be creating our own music we didn’t care.
After high school graduation I went the potato farm to work for the summer, as I had for several summers before, and the same farm where my uncle Ohama had his studio years previously.
This time I took all my new gear with me and set up what became my first bedroom studio. All the elements were there: the Ensoniq MIDI workstation keyboard, plus couple of other used keyboards, including an old Emulator II sampler, hooked up to the sequencer to provide a wider array of sounds. The drum machine, with an external sync box that would make its own patterns run in parallel with the Ensoniq’s sequencer. A microphone. The Fostex recorder so I could record the final audio of the MIDI sequence onto a stereo pair of tracks, then record vocals or needle-drop samples on the remaining two tracks. And my grandparents’ Sanyo home stereo, so I could listen to it all nice and loud.
Voila! My own studio.
Um, yes. Yes those are chairs being used as stands and studio furniture. And yes, all this stuff ate up as much room in the bedroom as the bed. How awesome was that?!
This wasn’t Abbey Road. It was freaking better than Abbey Road…at least it seemed so at the time. And while it seems a little crazy for me to think about today, every studio of mine since then has been a remixed and upgraded version of that first setup. Those same primary elements are all still here.
Thankfully, I’m no longer using chairs as equipment stands anymore, though. Yeesh.
Next up : Part 3 — College days: Learning the craft on a pile of old, used gear.
Previous post in this series: Part 1 — Listen to the Midnite News