Misguided Distortion: Becoming a Gearhead

I finally have everything I need at my fingertips. I've been twiddling with recording gear for about twelve years. It all started with a crappy logitech long neck computer microphone, a little program called DDClip Pro, and a lot of Mountain Dew. Needless to say I recorded a lot of crappy sounding stuff back then. Of course I moved on over the years to the "hotshit" Radioshack mixer(an endearing term coined by the publisher of the linked image) paired with the low quality super omnidirectional Radioshack microphone (there was nothing super about it). I recorded the second Warpharin album "Simple as It Seems" with all of those along with a cheap Radioshack keyboard all by my lonesome in a little apartment just outside of Chicago about 9 years ago. The first Warpharin album (the name escapes me at the moment) was recorded multi tracking with a karaoke machine lovingly called the Flubmaster 5000.

I've had my work cut out for me trying to make shit sound a little less like shit over the years. I often wonder how I made things sound better than they really were through digital effects and cramming signals through compressor plug-ins on slow Windows based machines. Some of the songs I put out simply because of the immense amount of time I spent cleaning them up and tweaking every last little thing I could to get it to sound just a little bit better. Running quiet four A.M. out of tune acoustic guitar recordings through noise reduction plug-ins three times over and then wondering why it sounded so damn crappy (but better than it did originally). Micing blown speaker keyboards with twelve dollar generic Wal-Mart computer microphones because I didn't have a headphone adapter to plug the keyboard directly into a slower than mud PC. And likewise with table top tape recorders because I couldn't put a cassette tape directly into a computer. Splicing wires together with scotch tape because I couldn't afford to by the right cord for the job.

I wonder why I did it really. My budget for recording wasn't enough to buy the real necessities, let alone anything worth it's weight in salt. No one in their right mind would waste as much time as I did trying to rig things up and expect any real good sounding results. But I did it anyway, because I'm insane. I'm addicted to it. I've had a real romance with recording music. I'm extremely close to it. It is my pet.

Fast forward to present day and things couldn't be easier. Everything is digital these days. I was wrestling with digital recording before it was even close to being cool. Alas, I have everything I need, quick, simple, astoundingly good sound quality without a lot of work. I've been so caught up with getting the songs recorded that I forgot to actually write the songs. Now is the time. Now I need to write the songs because the sound quality won't fail me... I just hope there's still some music left in my head...

The vocal booth: (w/ MXL990)