Introduction: Part I (1984-2004)

My first regular live sound engineering gig. 20 years old in the Woodford pub in Cork city

Ever since I decided to begin writing this blog I’ve been digging deep into the recesses of my memory to see if I could think of my first memory of sound recording. Growing up there was always music in my house. Long journeys in the car to visit my grandparents were accompanied by my parents’ cassette tapes; Elvis and Leonard Cohen were in heavy rotation. My father while driving would sometimes call out the lyrics for my mother ahead of the beat so that she could sing along even if she didn’t know all the words. She had the music and he had the lyrics.

In the back seat my sister and I each had our favourite spots to sit. She liked to lean forward to chat and sing along with the grown-ups in the front seats, while I would sit back and be fully immersed between the two rear speakers located behind the head rests. Now that I think of it this was undoubtedly my first immersive soundtrack experience. The car window to my left would frame the night sky, and one by one the telephone poles would whip by in the Irish countryside, dividing my view into frames on a roll of film, while Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’ would carry us home accompanied by our in-car chorus.

But that’s not my first memory of sound recording, by which I mean sound as a recorded medium, and an awareness of the processes that are involved. In fact that happened earlier still. One morning while my father was at work and my sister at school still, I sat in the kitchen with my mother. And she, likely in an attempt to keep me occupied, introduced me to a strange feature on the kitchen radio. She popped open the front-hinged tape deck and loaded in a blank tape. Then she closed it again and pressed down both the Play button and the clunky red Record button simultanously. She told me to say hello and to call out my name, so I did. A couple of clicks and whirring sounds later I was listening to my own voice played back through a crackly mono speaker. I looked closely at the symbols printed on the top of these magical buttons; a square, a triangle, and a circle, just like the blocks in my toy set.

And that was all it took. In a kitchen somewhere in the late 1980s I was bitten for the very first time by the recording bug. I was awake to the five core elements involved in a recording; the location, the recording device, the tape medium, the recording engineer, and the noise-maker. Over the years my fascination with the process would continue to grow and grow. My sister and I would invite our friends over to the house and record silly voices and fall around the place laughing. Later on we would record our favourite songs from the radio, praying the DJ would keep the intro short. At some point in my early teens it dawned on me to try and record my own music.

There was only one small problem; I didn’t own a mic. I had a Mexican Fender Strat at that point (cream with a light pine fretboard a la Jimi Hendrix) and a small but powerful Peavey guitar amp, but nothing to electrify my own voice. I did however have several sets of over ear headphones, and someone had once told me that a microphone is basically an inverted headphone. So I tried it out. I pried one headphone off the headband and using tape I attached the loose headphone to a six inch tube that I found in the bottom of a kitchen drawer. I plugged the headphone jack into the guitar input of my amp, and there it was. My voice, transduced from vibrating air waves into electrical signal, and back again into much louder airwaves through this Peavey amp. I quickly realised I had no microphone stand to hold this ‘microphone’ while I played. No problem! The cardboard box that the amp was stored in, the original packaging, was placed up on a chair in front of my own chair, and a hole was punched at around mouth height where the plastic tube/mic handle fit snugly. With my guitar plugged into the amp’s auxiliary input I was ready to go electric.

My recording setup was even more ghetto still. I had no recording device, only my trusty double cassette deck boombox. I also happened to own one of those cassette adapters that allowed you to play a CD discman in your car’s cassette player when an aux input wasn’t available. So I hooked the output of the amp to the input of the tape adapter, placed the tape adapter in one of the cassette decks of the boombox, and a blank tape in the other. I pressed Play on the adapter deck and Record on the blank tape deck and hoped for the best. After singing and strumming for a few minutes I pressed Stop, Rewind, and Play on the boombox. The sound coming back at me was extremely hissy, flat, and distant, but unmistakably my own voice and electric guitar. I had just improvised a mic, mic stand, preamp, mixer, and recording device, and it sounded horrendous.

The lesson that I learned along the way was to let my passion drive me, and to not be hindered by any technical considerations. Most obstacles can be overcome if you are resourceful and creative enough. In my late teens I was introduced by a friend to the world of digital audio workstations (DAW). Suddenly I was back at square one again, completely perplexed by the complexity of such an advanced set of tools. But one thing I knew for sure, this DAW was my key to levelling up and creating decent sounding recordings. I decided to persevere and not a day went by where I didn’t spend some time practising this new digital workflow, demystifying these strange new routing options one day at a time.

Pretty soon I was recording my own multitrack compositions on the family PC, spending time experimenting with effects plugins and mixing. The resulting recordings were burned to audio CDs and played on my friends’ hifi systems. When they realised what I was doing they asked me to record them too, and suddenly I was making a few quid on the side doing what I love. The money I made was always spent on improving my recording rig. After a short while I invested in a 16 input Pro Tools rig (Digi002 Rack with PT LE 6.9, along with a cheap Behringer 8 channel preamp via ADAT). Now I could record an entire band at once in their practise room using an Apple iBook laptop. For a short period I had a recording space in the centre of Cork city, above Prime Time clothing shop. As it turned out this space was once the studio location of the infamous pirate radio station, Radio Friendly, as I discovered when I inadvertently turned a visiting guitarist’s amp into a radio tuner thanks to a nearby FM antenna!

It was around that time that I also began to receive work requests to perform sound duties at live music gigs. I did a few apprenticeship gigs at the Savoy Theatre with their in-house engineer (10 Past 7 was a stand-out gig), and next a few nights assisting at Cypress Avenue (Delorentos and David Kitt were highlights there). I was introduced to Gavin Moore, a brilliant singer/songwriter and nephew of Christy Moore, who invited me to run the sound desk at his weekly gig in the Woodford pub in Cork City. Some great local acts passed through our stage; John Spillane, Mick Flannery, Ger Wolfe, Stanley Super 800, Gavin Glass, Hank Wedel and many many more. So many great nights were had here.

I was still studying my undergraduate Arts degree in UCC at the time, recording bands in my spare time, and working part-time in Gino’s pizzeria on Winthrop Street. All the pizza and music I could eat; those truly were Halcyon days!