I remember the day clearly. It was when everything that I thought was fun about recording got turned on its head. Until that point I'd enjoyed mucking about with tape decks as a way to document my own ideas. Aside from labeling a cassette insert with a working song title after 4-tracking, I hadn't spent extra time taking notes about the tracks I'd recorded. Sure, I'd made records in studios, but someone else did the engineering and producing — I was just the bass player. I certainly didn't take very many notes. But here I was, sitting by a tiny window in my basement looking at one of my earliest paying clients knocking out a take, and I realized something important: I now had to start generating some paperwork and documenting my sessions. The honeymoon was over.
It became pretty obvious at that moment I now had a real job to do. No more would I simply sit and watch the musicians in the other room banging away on their instruments — now I would be expected to hunch over a clipboard and scribble notes onto specialized track sheets... or, at the very least, grab a Sharpie and write song titles and times on the back of a reel box. This wasn't fun. I thought recording music was supposed to be fun!
But worst of all, I now had to keep track of where the sections of a song were in relation to the tape counter. People would want to punch in parts, and they would assume that in that last five minutes I'd completely learned the structure of their song and could rewind right back to any part they requested at a moment's notice.
Yet I continued on, opening a studio in a commercial space and buying a 2-inch tape deck that had no counter. Do you want to stare helplessly into the depths of hell? Buy a tape deck that has no counter. You will spend endless hours looking for that third chorus while musicians glare at you, only to punch in at the wrong spot anyway. Eventually I was able to talk an engineer into building me a custom tape counter, thank god.