Back about 1983 I was living in Sacramento, California. As it happens, the California State Fair is held there, which makes sense as it's the state capital. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego are all bigger and more important, but Sacto gets the fair. Yay. So, I went. And, as I was unemployed at the time, I went several times.
I grew up in New England, where there's all kinds of fairs. They last usually 4 days. California's lasts a month. Lots and lots of cool stuff to see and do. One of the things is a big stage, and there was music every day and every night. I heard that Bill Graham was promoting the stage that year. I got to see Santana, the Police, Huey Lewis and the News, Greg Kihn, and a number of other great acts, all for the price of admission to the fair.
My favorite of all those acts was an afternoon session by Ronnie Montrose and Mitchel Froom. Now, one of the things that's always impressed me about Rush is how much music three guys can make. Montrose and Froom went one better. No vocals, which made it easier, but those two guys made a lot of great sound. And Montrose only played guitar!
This was in the early days of MIDI, and maybe even before, I'm not sure. Froom was surrounded by a bank of keyboards and boxes, and at one point stepped out from behind it, with incredible music cranking away, and played what looked like a digital trumpet; it had three buttons on the top, a dial in the front, and he blew into it. Way too cool!! The biggest shame of it is they never did a record.
From that day on I kept an eye out for the latest musical technology. In the later '80's when I got back to NH I started collecting some stuff. I had a budget of zero, so it was all used and obsolete, but worked just fine. If you've ever heard my CD, "Rough Edges," most of it was done on a Tascam 4-track cassette machine owned by the band I was in, Tribute, and the sounds came from a Yamaha DX7, a Roland Juno 106 and a Yamaha drum machine, all controlled by a Roland MSQ-700. If you're a synth gear head, maybe you're impressed now. Lots with little, in a nutshell.
All that stuff is long gone. About 1999 or so, T. C. Sweeney talked me into forming a band, and I've been oriented toward live guitar playing ever since. Which I love, btw. Nothing better than working with live people. But for about 10 years before that, I rarely played live. I spent most of my musical life after the end of Tribute hiding in a hole making little demos. If it wasn't for Jonathan Sindorf and the Hidden Place Coffeehouse, I'd have probably never played out at all.
So now I'm back out playing, and I'm also back to writing, and it's time to record. Actually, I never really intended to stop writing and recording, but the Tascam 4-track gave up the ghost years ago. So for the past several years I've been looking at the new developments in digital recording. And here comes the rant for which this is the long-winded intro.
Advice to my musician friends; NEVER recommend a piece of Tascam recording gear to me. I rented an 8-track digital recorder for a month once. Didn't get one lousy note recorded. Had the manual, read it cover to cover, went online and sought advice, tried and tried and tried to plug it in and hook it up and figure out the confusing menus on the little screen, and ended up with bupkis. Bupkus? However you spell it, I got nutt'n.
When I took it back and told the young man at the store what I ended up with, he had the audacity to ask if I wanted to rent it for another month! No, I don't want to grtzn frtzn rent the grzzl frakk thing for another khtthkn frzzgrn month, you &%$#@ ...
So my dear friend, Rocko now owns a Zoom R-16. He's the drummer in one version of the Red Hat Band, the version that does all the original material. Perfect. I'd been looking around at digital multitrack recorders, and I've owned a few pieces of Zoom equipment, and they're always pretty easy to use. I had been thinking about an R-24, but Rocko decided to save me $400 and bought this one first.
He immediately loaned it to me! But first, he warned me that he'd had very little luck figuring out how to use it. Basically, all he'd managed to do with it so far is use it like an old-fashioned tape recorder. You could hook up mics and guitars and get tracks laid down, but that's it. He couldn't figure out how to add the on-board effects or access the on-board drum and bass programs, or any of the other bells and whistles that came with it.
No problem. He still had the manual, and I would take the time and figure out how to make it do its tricks. Zooms are user friendly.
Note to Zoom; when you put that phrase on your packaging, Hoser is spelled with an H.
I come from a day when "portable" meant that it had wheels. There was nothing wrong with that. I think it's wonderful that you can now put almost infinite capabilities inside a box no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Unfortunately, when you do, it equals the pack of cigarettes in usability. The R-16 is only as big as it is because it has 8 sliders. So, you've got a small 8-channel mixing board with a pack of butts attached to it.
My recommendation is that you put all this marvelous technology in a device big enough for banks of buttons and switches, with clear markings as to their purpose. Large, readable print would be nice, too. You should also include a 21" high-def television screen for showing what the hell's going on in the pack of butts all the 1's and 0's live in. Then, put wheels on it. Charge an extra hundred bucks if you have to. If it actually works as advertised, you will find me in the long line of old geeks waiting to buy one.
