RECORDED BETWEEN: August 2024 - March 2025
When I was in the eighth grade, my grandfather left me with his old portastudio. At the time, I was thirteen years old, and the clunky, archaic portastudio seemed too difficult to bother trying to learn. I let it sit in my bedroom for months, occasionally using it for its effects processor.
During that summer vacation, I was fourteen years old. Marching band practice had just begun, and I was playing the sousaphone. One afternoon, before leaving to go to practice, on a whim, I powered on the old portastudio and decided that I would write and record my first song. I picked up my guitar and started improvising a bit. Within a couple minutes, I armed the track and recorded my first ever track. I then followed it with a bass track that I improvised, and a drum track, split from battered percussion and cymbals from my old Yamaha drum machine. You can hear this recording here.
I had no prior experience to songwriting. As a child, I loved to play the guitar and the bass, and I tended to learn songs very quickly, but I never thought to start writing songs 'till I was about twelve years old. I would monkey around with the guitar at times, but usually ended up empty-handed as far as any workable material.
In the following months since I recorded my first song, I became enamoured with my portastudio. I spent many hours each day writing and recording and experimenting with it. I recorded the entire album in-between marching band practice and school.
In March of the following year, I was sick of sitting on these songs, so I released it on Bandcamp. I began to burn my own CDs of the album, giving maybe five or six of them to some friends around school. After that, I started recording my next album.
Unfortunately, due to my inexperience on the portastudio, the mixing and audio quality on this album is rather bad. I hadn't quite understood how to use the EQ faders or use reverb, and I didn't know how the gain and compression affected the mixing.
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