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There are two essentials to Home Recording. One is that you have disposable cash. The other is that you have disposable time. In both these I have always been lacking! Without making excuses for the production of many far less than perfect pieces of musical ditty, I have to admit to have always been about five years behind in the creative process - and to have had an incredible nack of aquiring quirky gear that didn't always do what it was supposed to!

Pictured to your left is what for many years was my sole piece of recording gear - a very durable and still functioning Wien RT - 425. It sounded worse than it looks. Yet I wandered around for years recording band practices - noises in the street - piano playing - you name it… usually on C120 tapes which broke. Hey, when it's all you've got, you make the most of it. I still have a faded tape of ancient 'Eric' practices and random bits of strange stuff that's called - 'THE C120', hailing back to my youth.

It was many moons later that I finally had a 'reel' tape recorder to call my very own. Actually I had two. An Akai 4000DB and an Akai 4000. The idea was to record on one, and then record onto the other one whilst the first was playing back. I'd been trying to do it for ages with cassette players and was less than impressed with the results. But now.. With this technology… well it was better than the Wien.

One of the great fun things you could do with the Akai's was use them as tape echo units. They had a "Sound on Sound" head which was to enable multitrack mono recording - but could also turn into a kicking echo machine. With my trusty little Roland SH-1000 synth and Wem Teishcord Organ, weird sound textures became the order if the day. Blame it on those Tangerine Dream records .

Of course at this stage of my musical career, whilst I was making funny echoes and hissy song recordings, other people were getting into 4 and 8 track recorders, sequencing synths together with gate units (something the SH1000 was totally not designed to do) and the emergence of computers as sequencing tools. Such things were to elude me for quite a while.

Then along came the Teac A3340. A second hand one with a dodgy fourth channel (at a time when the A3440 with DBX unit was the thing to go for), but, never mind, this I could afford after selling one of the Akia's. My goodfriend Phillip Jones even made me a mixing desk to go with it, so things were looking up. Of course I still only had a couple of guitars, the SH1000 and Wem organ, but it was getting better all the time.

I was even able to borrow 'SALTS' H/H mixer on one occasion, which had built in effects in it. Wooooh! Up till then my effects rack consisted of an Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress pedal (which rocked) and an echo unit.

The computer had to come later. It came from Woolworths in Chester. A boxed Commodore C64, promising all sorts of musical goodies such as a Sound Sampler and 5 octave keyboard. With hindsight I can categorically tell you that no matter how many little add on boxes you buy, a C64 was not designed to be the basis for a home studio. Still, I loved that computer. What is it about your first computer that evokes such emotion?

Computer music never really happened for me until I got an Atari. Now we were going somewhere! C-Lab had a program called 'Notator" that was just a dream come true. By this time I'd also purchased a Roland D10 keyboard and an Akai S700 Sampler.

Now - these were not state of the art, but they were again, that wonderful criteria - affordable! At last I had truly entered the wonderful world of MIDI. The icing on the cake came when I almost over-stretched my financial limits and purchased a Fostex 8-Track recorder. Now, for the first time, I could record analog stuff and MIDI stuff together. O.K, so the rest of the world had been doing that for the past 10 years, but like I said at the start, I've always been that little bit behind.

I was well pleased when a demo I had made, called "Not about Goats" had a real nice review from a guy who was a record producer. Such things are the ultimate Home Recording accolade!

And then, dear readers, what do I go and do, having finally got myself a studio I could work with? Well, emigrate to a country with a totally different electric supply neccesitating the selling of just about all of the above (with the exception of the Wien and the Teac). And you know how it is. You always mean to pit the money aside and replace what you got rid of, but when it comes to the crunch and the money gets tight.. well the kids need shoes!

Five years down the road I'm finally getting back into the Home Recording thing. First came the Alesis QS7 - a fortieth birthday present. It's great - but has been back to the shop twice for repairs - something the old D10 never bugged me with.

I've also got a Pentium II computer running Steinbergs Cubase VST. Good program. But with one fatal flaw. Those of us who are financially strapped can't keep up with the upgrades or afford separate computers from the one we have to do everything else on! Steinberg Cubase is not a user friendly program. It eats up memory. It crashes. It freezes. And the tech support can be lacking. Hmm. The old Atari and Notator used to be so solid! Such is progress.

The newest addition to the household of sound is the little beasty on the left. A Korg D1600. Time will tell if it can deliver all that it promises. But so far, so good. Onboard effects. 16 Channels. Syncs to the computer. All sounds good. Now if only I was 15 again! I could have really used this stuff back then.

So there you have it folk.

Home Recording.

An expensive and often frustrating little hobby.

If you're trying to sound like a billion dollars you probably need to get into a studio in the real world.

But if you're content to fiddle about,

are satisfied when somebody tells you something sounds allright

(or even pretty good),

enjoy playing music as much as listening to it,

then travelling the highways of Home Recording

can be a happy little diversion for your life.

Click here to download some of Adrian's Homemade Recordings

Or even purchase his CD "Walk on the Weird Side"