What makeshift gear did you use when starting out all those years ago?

[Skol303]

No so much bass related, but I started making my own music in the '80s using a tape-to-tape cassette recorder: bodging together parts of one track with another, like a crude form of mixing.

I then had lots of fun using old video game tracker software to make rudimentary electronic music. And started DJing using a pair of turntables that had no pitch control - adjusting the speed/pitch by pressing my finger against the side of the platter to slow records down and match tempos when mixing.

All very crude and rudimentary, but it encouraged me to be experimental and squeeze every last drop of usefulness from the tools I had available at the time. Today I think music-makers have almost the opposite problem: a bewildering and sometimes 'intimidating' amount of resources at their fingertips. All good, of course. And still loads of scope for experimentation - but more for those who seek it out by choice, rather than necessity. Hence less impetus for real invention, perhaps. I dunno

[Dood]

[quote name='Norris' timestamp='1509695347' post='3400864']
There was the time I made my own FM transmitter. I think it was a Maplin kit which I built into an old Colmans mustard tin. I calibrated it by tuning the Bush hifi to 108MHz and then manually tweaking the inductor coil on the transmitter until I got a cleanish signal. That was back in the day when 108MHz upwards was used by the emergency services!
[/quote]


Oh wow! I did the same!! Mine was a kit from one of the electronics magazines. Not sure which, Elektor, Practical Electronics or Maplin. I tweaked an ‘FM Bug’ schematic to take the level of my bass and demonstrated it in my 4th year CDT classes.. Year 10 in new money. It’s was great, if you didn’t stray from the room!

[Dood]

On the subject of Radiograms, ours had a problem with the right hand audio channel, so I lifted the amp guts out of the wooden shell and used my little electronics knowledge I had to build a low pass filter so I could hook it up to my hifi and use the big speakers as a sub!

[bazzbass]

30 watts !!!!! coz bass needs to be loud lol Edited November 4, 2017 by bazztard

[SpondonBassed]

[quote name='dood' timestamp='1509747640' post='3401451']
Oh wow! I did the same!! Mine was a kit from one of the electronics magazines. Not sure which, Elektor, Practical Electronics or Maplin. I tweaked an ‘FM Bug’ schematic to take the level of my bass and demonstrated it in my 4th year CDT classes.. Year 10 in new money. It’s was great, if you didn’t stray from the room!
[/quote]

I was a regular subscriber to Practical Wireless magazine as a teenager. I never built any of the projects though. Rural Ireland wasn't the best of places to source new components.

Luckily, my aunt and uncle had a television and radio shop that did repairs. Their resident technician let me sit in the workshop and soak up whatever knowledge he cared to impart. At the back of the place was a mountain of discarded televisions and radios.

I started collecting 10 inch speakers and making my own enclosures for them at home. Even then I was seeking that fullness in the bass range that was so lacking in domestic systems.

Edited November 4, 2017 by SpondonBassed

[SimonEdward]

From memory, this was the 3rd instrument I had as a kid ~ after a recorder and violin. I chose to do music GCSE as an option at school in the mid 1980's, and my parents got me this;

A Yamaha Portasound PSS 270. FM synth with a fixed arpeggiator - "auto accompaniment" on the lower two octaves, and some use able patches (Bass, strings and brass). No midi.

In the 90's, I traded it for a DX7 MK2 ~ frankly, the PSS 270 might actually have been better?!

[SpondonBassed]

[quote name='SimonEdward' timestamp='1509789430' post='3401615']
From memory, this was the 3rd instrument I had as a kid ~ after a recorder and violin. I chose to do music GCSE as an option at school in the mid 1980's, and my parents got me this;

A Yamaha Portasound PSS 270. FM synth with a fixed arpeggiator - "auto accompaniment" on the lower two octaves, and some use able patches (Bass, strings and brass). No midi.

In the 90's, I traded it for a DX7 MK2 ~ frankly, the PSS 270 might actually have been better?!


[/quote]

I still have my Yamaha PSR21s. Two because Dad had one as well.

Referencing the OP, there's nothing makeshift about them. Because they were released when MIDI was in the transition between advanced wizardry and industry standard, a lot of people by-passed them for fully digital keyboards with samplers and modules. The PSRs were very much a beginner's tool. I still jammed with mine on occasion.

My other guilty pleasure is ownership of a Roland TR606. How I wish I'd sprung for the 808.

Thanks for the memory jogger.

Edited November 4, 2017 by SpondonBassed

[SimonEdward]

[quote name='SpondonBassed' timestamp='1509801006' post='3401735']
I still have my Yamaha PSR21s. Two because Dad had one as well.

Referencing the OP, there's nothing makeshift about them. Because they were released when MIDI was in the transition between advanced wizardry and industry standard, a lot of people by-passed them for fully digital keyboards with samplers and modules. The PSRs were very much a beginner's tool. I still jammed with mine on occasion.

My other guilty pleasure is ownership of a Roland TR606. How I wish I'd sprung for the 808.

Thanks for the memory jogger.
[/quote]

Yes indeed! The PSS's and PSR's were far from makeshift. I had mine hooked up to a hi fi cassette recorder, and everything I composed had to be recorded Live + a little notation.

How times change? Your mention of the Roland TR series drum machines, reminded me of many happy hours in the school music block, with a Roland TR505 and a Casio CZ-101. In terms of resources, that's all we had. Far from great, but as they say, it's not what you've got ...

Thanks for the memory jog also.

[BigRedX]

[quote name='SpondonBassed' timestamp='1509801006' post='3401735']
My other guilty pleasure is ownership of a Roland TR606. How I wish I'd sprung for the 808.
[/quote]

In 1983/84 I was lucky enough to be in a band that owned a TR808. Compared with the affordable competition, it was streets ahead in terms of programmability and the range of sounds available. Up against the other fully programmable drum machines of the time such as the LinnDrum it was quite a bit cheaper. There was fair amount of tweak ability to the sounds, and the individual outputs meant that there were even more possibilities. Programming patterns was simple even for someone who was a bit rhythmically challenged like myself.

However that's it as far as the good stuff goes. Pattern memory was limited to 32 1-bar patterns or 16 2-bar patterns. Most songs unless they were very simple used up nearly all the available patterns. Programming the patterns into a song meant running it in real time changing the patterns as required while the device recorded what you were doing, and while it was possible to edit a song, it was almost always easier to start again from the beginning if you made a mistake. While it remembered everything when powered off, there was no way of saving your programming for one song so that you could work on another. Not even the good old cassette dump interface. I had hundreds of photocopied sheets with pattern grids drawn onto them, so that we could write down the rhythms for each song. And the sounds while they were adjustable, you very quickly discovered that there were only really a couple of good sounding variations for each drum. And unless you were doing hiphop/electro no-one used the cowbell!

I did see a band who somewhat managed to get their complete set into an 808, but they only used a handful of different rhythms for all their songs and all the fills had to be triggered manually. And the fact that they had managed to achieve this was unfortunately the most remarkable thing about their music.

We sold ours and replaced it with a Yamaha RX11.

[SpondonBassed]

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1509961177' post='3402814']
...And unless you were doing hiphop/electro no-one used the cowbell!...
[/quote]

Ah... that dreaded dink sound. Also favoured by Whitney Houston on [i]I Wanna Dance With Somebody[/i]. It was in the charts for a long time and I grew to hate that sound with passion. The dink was a bit annoying as well.

Happy days...

[SpondonBassed]

By the way. I am also a radiogram hacker.

I hated changing records on it because of the low cabinet and hinged door. I removed the turntable and made a plinth for it to sit on top of the unit. It was a simple thing to extend the wiring from the turntable and send it back into the cabinet through the grill at the back. I also made up external speaker cabinets for it and filled them with discarded 10 inch drivers from my aunt and uncle's scrap heap.

I was 14 when I did that. I got my first half-decent turntable, a Pioneer PL12D, in my early twenties.

That Alba radiogram smelt wonderful when it warmed up. That and the valve glow through the grill with the lights out are the [i]only[/i] things I miss about it.

[Toddy17]

Not read the whole thread, but very cool, personally my history on bass started on a Hondo precision thou a 100w HH 6 Chanel head into a butchered cab,,luxury as previously the whole band used the head! Had a built in spring reverb,,some decent strings and was more than good enough at the time...