Hi ... I thought I'd share a recent new "experience" I'm going through ... maybe some of you can relate?! I decided to look through the old cassette tapes I had in a box under my bed. About 2-3 dozen of them are recordings from bands I was in, from high-school (late 1970s) through college age and up into the early 1990s. So I decided to "digitize" some of them into my computer.

What fun it's been! So many of the old recordings bring back great memories - of the other musicians, the gigs, the "war stories", the occasional odd occurrences, but most of all the fun and camaraderie it was to play in bands back then! I have even started finding (via LinkedIn and Facebook etc.) some band-mates that I haven't talked with in several decades, so I can share some of it with them. It's been lots of fun!

I have found recordings I literally don't remember making ... some are live from gigs, others are in "basement studio" kind of settings. It's also interesting to hear the progression of equipment I had (and other band members had) - keyboards and drum machines etc. have advanced a LOT since those days! Some of the earliest recordings have me playing some old analog "electric piano" (not a Rhodes or Wurli; I couldn't afford those) that sound horrible to my ears now! And old organs (Yamaha YC models, others), old synths (Mini Korg, others), then later a DX-7, etc. And before arrangers, I got my first drum machine in the early 1980s - a Sequential Circuits Drumtrax; which sounded fairly decent on some of the old recordings.

It's also interesting how almost 40-year-old cassettes have actually held up pretty well, considering they were made mostly on consumer-grade recorders back then.

Anyway, if any of you have some REALLY old recordings from your younger years, you might find it enjoyable to "resurrect them"!

-Jim

I have a box full of old cassettes from live shows, song recordings also......
amazing when you listen back to them hearing the old keyboards, and gear used making them, some in studio tape, others using a boom box also.............good stuff

The oldest one I found was done at a BASF place somewhere in
London - whether or not it was in a proper studio is lost to the mists of time now, but it was back in 1960.

The tape looks okay (it's always been in its original box) but I'm nervous about running it through the rigours of a reel-to-reel deck.

Likewise with a couple of cassettes from about 1974.

I have cassettes, reel-to-reel, 8-track, VHS, CD, and now digital recordings of myself and my old bands. Need to do the project!