Monthly Archives: March 2013

It was expensive. It was cute. It was useless. A 21st century Luddite laments:

Posted on by Kathy Freeman

It was expensive. It was cute.  It was useless……. I wanted to overdub a guitar solo and harmony vocals onto a  draft track of a new Kathy X song.  But would my new expensive cute useless device let me do that….?

Count-ins, fade-outs, panning, sampling, 6 live drum sounds, 9 guitar sounds, string section and fun-audio-experience graphics – No problem. Overdubbing one track? – Highly impossible.

So  I did a  non-overdubbed track.. No guitar solo. No harmony vocals.  I wanted to e-mail it  to Dr Duck the drummer so he could figure out some beats.  However the fruits of my labour emerged in the form of a “CAF” (Confusion And Futility?) file which his computer couldn’t open. 

I’d bought the expensive-cute-useless device because I needed a no-brainer bedroom-guitar recording device. Then I remembered –  in another life that’s EXACTLY what I used to have. Two in fact. They were called “cassette recorders” I  would record a song on one. There was a little dial to control the input volume level. If I didn’t get the song right, I wiped the track and started again. When I was happy with the recording I played along with it, making the final recording on the second player.  OK, I couldn’t have converted the fruits of my labour into an MP3. But in the hours that it took to convert the CAF to an MP3  I could have jumped on a bus  and taken the cassette round to Dr D. With time over to  sample his HMP (home-made pizza)

just call me a 21st century Luddite!