Ashes, The Rain And I

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California Girls wasn’t the only song that my high school buddy Tom and I recorded together. We both were very interested in learning about audio recording and we experimented with recording ourselves on our acoustic guitars in Tom’s bedroom. We started off recording with two Sony stereo reel-to-reel tape recorders… I believe that Tom bought his Sony 630 when we were 16, and I already had an older Sony that my dad had given to me. We also had available to us a Radio Shack 6-channel stereo microphone mixer that Tom had modified by adding pan pots - the mixer belonged to our youth group, but we were in charge of the sound equipment so we were able to use it for our projects. And we picked up recording tips where ever we could - sometimes we would hang out at recording studios in Hollywood, but also at that time there was a new audio recording periodical called The Mix, which was published on newsprint. We would get the latest issue from our local music stores and study it intently. We spent hours and hours experimenting, recording ourselves - although most of the tapes have not survived the ensuing years. A few did survive however, like California Girls and a few other songs, like Tom and I with two other friends from high school playing Jumpin’ Jack Flash - although that wasn’t one of our better recordings. One of the songs that did turn out well was Ashes, The Rain And I. This is a song that was originally recorded by The James Gang, one of our favorite bands at the time, and although it featured an orchestra section, it was basically a song played with acoustic guitars, so we decided that we could record our own version. We recorded our guitars - Tom playing his Ventura 12-string and me playing my Ventura 6-string - in stereo (Tom panned towards the right, me towards the left) on one of our tape recorders. Then we played the recorder back through the 6-channel mixer, with Tom singing along and me adding bass guitar, and recorded the whole thing onto the second tape recorder. The final result sounded pretty good, but we were trying to keep the bass guitar mixed pretty low, so it wouldn’t overpower any other instrument and, unfortunately, we mixed it a bit too low - you can only hear the bass on a real good music system, and only very slightly during the verse. But still, the recording came out pretty good, considering our available resources and location - this is the result of two tape recorders, two seventeen-year-olds and their guitars:

Ashes, The Rain And I