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A blast from the past!

For those of us who are old enough to remember - circa late 70's, early 80's - pre recorded drum tracks on vinyl.

The drummer, DAvid Crigger, recorded a bunch of drum tracks at Sound City in L.A.; he played several different styles on each album ( I think there were 4 albums total) - rock, country, disco, ballad, jazzy, bluesy...

Arranged musically in 8 bar phrases (for verses and choruses), you simply picked the pattern you thought would fit the style of the song you were writing, put it on your TT, and recorded it to 2 tracks ( or one for mono) on your tape machine, and voila'! You had an "instant" drum track.
(Crigger was even polite enough to give you a 4 count at the top of each track. LOL)

To answer some questions in advance:

Yes, you also got the clicks and pops of the vinyl.
Yes, occasionally the drumming was out of time, and out of pocket.
Yes, you were very limited in what you could do with your compositions, because you had to write your song around the drum tracks.

Yes, they worked - sort of.
They were kinda handy to have around when you needed drums, and you had your four track Tascam Porta One (or a Dokorder or Teac R to R 4 track) but no drummer, or, no drums or mics to record real drums with.

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moonbaby Tue, 01/27/2015 - 12:51

I forgot about those things...I had the blue one!!! Yes, the clicks were , in some cases, horrendous. I figured that they were deliberately inserted to keep folks from actually using the tracks in a commercial recording. I sold these back in the late 70s and WARPING was an issue with them being shipped all the way from California...it gave the rhythm tracks a certain "swing" !