What inspired you to get into home recording records like Black Vinyl Shoes?
Gary Klebe: It was really through necessity. At the time, we weren't musicians. In fact, I'm still reluctant to call myself a musician. We didn't play live; it was a band in name only. Recording was our only way to be in music. Playing live wasn't a realistic option. That came along later, but it was always secondary to recording. We weren't capable of doing anything but record. There was a lot of punching in and out, and redoing. We weren't natural virtuosos at singing or playing guitars.
Jeff Murphy: We would say to each other, "You've only got to get it right one time." While we were learning how to play, we were stumbling, and it was like, "I've just got to get one good take that I can keep, and then we'll move on to the next thing." That helped us learn and mature. We're more songwriters, arrangers, and producers than musicians. Musically, we learned to play by trying to write a song and play what we heard in our heads, which is kind of the backwards way of doing it. Most musicians learn their craft by playing first, and then later learning how to write songs. We came up the exact opposite. We were born in the studio; it was our home. Now, home recording is more the norm, with Pro Tools and other DAW software.
GK: Without the TEAC [A-]3340S tape machine, there'd be no band. That's what allowed us to put our foot in the door and see if we could do this. We were very sheepish about it at the time. Anyone we knew – friends, acquaintances, or whatever – would make fun of us. "If you don't play live, then what good are you?" We thought, "Well, you might be right, but this is all that we can do right now."
JM: Gary and I both had stereo reel-to-reel tape machines that had the sound-on-sound function. One day, in early 1974, this friend of mine who worked at an audio store said, "Oh, you've gotta check out this new TEAC machine that's coming. You can do four channels. They'll be in time with each other, because there's a sync switch. You can do overdubs!" Now, with Pro Tools, most people don't realize the whole challenge of recording with the limitation of using only four channels on analog tape. With the 3340S, we could record on one track and then listen to it in sync mode while recording on another track in perfect time. Without that sync capability, we wouldn't have been able to bounce tracks around. Recording Black Vinyl Shoes would have been impossible.
What planning did you do to make the best of the low track count availability on the TEAC deck?
GK: Jeff had a formula for it.
JM: In the very first recordings, we simply recorded one instrument directly to each of the four tracks. But then we got more sophisticated. We remembered reading about how The Beatles recorded. They would talk about making "reductions." We called it "ping-ponging" or "bouncing." We would record on three of the channels and then mix those together and "bounce" them down to the fourth channel as we plugged in and played along to it. Now, the fourth channel contained what was bounced from the first three channels, plus whatever additional instruments, handclaps, or background vocals that we mixed in during the bounce. Then we could go back and erase the first three channels and record new instruments on them. Using the same process, we'd continue bouncing between channels as we mixed in new instruments or vocals. It was all recorded piecemeal, bit by bit. The real challenge was that we'd have to guess in advance how loud an instrument needed to be in comparison with instruments that weren't even recorded yet. We learned to record the bass last, because the bass guitar would get mushy if you bounced it. As we recorded the bass, we might play a tambourine or something with high frequencies, like maracas, along with it. Later on, if we thought the mix wasn't quite right between the bass and percussion, because they were recorded together, we couldn't change the volume between the two. But we could still go in with EQ and make the tambourine feel a little louder by adding around 7 kHz or so, and that it wouldn't affect the bass. So, we would sub-mix the channels this way and EQ the difference. We learned that we could not ping-pong more than twice without the quality really deteriorating.
GK: It was like in the mastering stage these days, where EQ and compression are used to bring up the vocals, or bass, or whatever. We were using a cheap Peavey live mixer for everything.
JM: Yeah, we had a Peavey 1200S mixer, which to us back then was like, "Woo-hoo! Now we're in it for real!"
That's so rad. I was going to ask about the Roland Space Echo you had. Was it always recorded and mixed in as you went along, or were you adding any of it in later?
JM: It was always recorded with the instrument, mixed together as we recorded. Since that was our only effects unit, it was the only way to be able to put varied effects on each instrument. But that relationship between the instrument and the effect was locked in. We couldn't change it later. One of the examples is Gary's guitar on "Tragedy," which is very effected, washy, dreamy, and spacey. That was that Space Echo. He's using it for those effects, so it had to be recorded along with that guitar. In the final mix, we would pan it left, or right, or whatever. But mixing is a deceiving term with that album. Everything was already set in stone because of all the ping-ponging. All we could really do with those four tracks was decide where to pan them and add EQ. One channel would be panned left, one would be on the right, one would be in the center because it had the bass, and another would be in the center because it had the main vocal. There wasn't a whole lot of mixing that could be done at that last stage.
GK: But we felt lucky. We were like, "Wow, four tracks! That's a lot!" Another thing that's interesting, thinking back, I don't know how we did it, but we didn't have monitors. We just used headphones.
Until the end with the mixing?
GK: All the recording was done with headphones only. When it was time to mix, we used some Advent speakers from Jeff's stereo system as monitors. That was the first time we'd used actual speakers in the recording process.
