Tascam 388

Just look at the thing – bloody magnificent isn’t it? For about 5 years the Tascam 388 ruled my life as I was variously trying to lift it, get it repaired, find it accommodation and even actually use it to make recordings. Having been gifted a certain sum of money from the sale of her own mother’s house, when I was 18 or so my mother offered to buy something substantial for both my sister and me. Sister chose a second-hand car – a Datsun Cherry maybe, or if not something like it. Perversely perhaps, given that I had no means of moving it and no permanent address, I chose the Tascam. The Tascam, which weighs possibly only a couple of pounds less than a Datsun Cherry.

During the 5 or so years I used the Tascam 388, depending on university term dates, cash-flow and the less than seamless transition from one major relationship to another, I lived in a shared house in Plymouth, university halls, a flat in Clapham, back to the Plymouth house for 2 months, a house in Greenwich, then Gray’s Inn Road central London, a lovely Georgian place in Islington, Brixton (briefly), a short stay at my mother’s place in South Devon (very much between relationships at this point), Battersea, then Vauxhall, a short let in Bloomsbury and then back to a different flat on Gray’s Inn Road. Suffice to say that by the end of this period in my life I had at least developed a crude lifting technique, which involved swinging the thing up at specific angle which in turn allowed me to, in short planned phases, singly lug the unit into the back of a van, taxi or even up one flight of stairs at a time.

Unsurprisingly, on the two occasions I was burgled when I owned the 388, clearly the burglars themselves considered it surplus to requirements.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Tascam 388, it was basically a giant Portastudio - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portastudio - that used 7-inch spools of quarter inch tape, rather than cassettes, to provide 8 tracks of recording. To the left of the recording section was a reasonably well appointed mixing section, and along the top of the unit a set of nicely laid out meters, so you could see what your audio was up to. Whilst a professional engineer would no doubt have had an issue with the quality of the mixing desk, in terms of flexibility and signal quality, that wasn’t the problem for me and the 388. Rather it was the tape recorder that suffered from two main issues: firstly it didn’t sound any good, and secondly when it wasn’t sounding any good, it was broken. Repeatedly.

Over the years just about everything that could go wrong with the reel-to-reel unit did go wrong. The pinch roller which kept the tape running cleanly over the recording head wore out quickly, creating a pleasing tremolo effect on everything during a brief period of it’s physical decline, the tension arms were a constant problem, the record head wore out very quickly (probably because there was too much tension caused by the arms being too tight) and finally the motor surrendered. Parts of it I replaced myself, but I’m grateful to Keith, drummer and good friend, for lifts to places as varied as Camden and Watford, (and I think somewhere unexpected once like Newton Abbot) where you could find a qualified Tascam engineer.

Running at 7.5 inches a second, the 388 was never likely to be a particularly high-fidelity recorder (though God knows what the reliability would have been like if they’d designed the thing to run at 15 inches a second), but the noise reduction system on it was surprisingly good, and it certainly had a sound of its own. It shied away from the bass end of the frequency spectrum, but could be encouraged to do stuff at the other end of the frequency range if you gambled and recorded with loads of treble boost on the way in. What came back never quite sounded like that which went in, but once you got used to the thing, finding work arounds first became part of the charm, and then you didn’t even realise you were doing it.

So it was ludicrously heavy, hopelessly impractical to own at that point in my life, and didn’t actually sound very good. But it was absolutely brilliant. It was a world I could just lose myself in – on those infrequent occasions when I recorded something that worked, that other people agreed worked, I’d have a sense of complete freedom in that the Tascam made me feel that just about anything that I wanted to do was sonically achievable. But this musical freedom was quite the antithesis of the impact the machine had on my personal life – in that respect it was a millstone: every flat rental would be predicated around where I could conceivably put the thing, I had to call in countless favours to shift it, and funnily enough ownership of such a technological marvel transpired to have little or no effect on my perceived levels of attractiveness. A Datsun Cherry may have had more so, simply because if its unarguable greater practicality in non-musical social interaction.

When I was still living in Devon, I occasionally hired the 388 and my services as an engineer to local bands, for I think the princely sum of £30 a day. Given that such an amount would double my then weekly disposable income, the work was irresistible. Most memorable was ‘Who’s Rachel?’ who had a track that, over the course of innumerable verses, sped up from catatonically slow to unplayably fast (at least unplayably for the band in question). But I liked them and I really liked their name. It transpired that it was borne out of countless conversations they’d had in which they’d all drone on, rarely actually listening to each other, when someone would crack and enquire, after a stream of anecdotes relating to some particular individual, ‘who’s Rachel?’

With a laptop and some free software, you can put a far better recording system today at a fraction of the cost and weight. Or you could spend similar amounts of money and put a ridiculously better quality system together. But then you don’t really notice or remember the stuff that just does what it’s supposed to do. On the days it was working, the 388 made me feel quite uncannily good. I miss that feeling, if not the 388 itself.

Jetglo Rickenbacker 330

For some reason, just about any shop selling the 330 lifts its online promotional copy from the Rickenbacker website with a paragraph which starts, “Careful acoustic research has resulted in the full, rich and warm sound of this model.” Which is odd for two reasons: firstly no other guitar seems to suffer from the same ubiquity of description online, and secondly the description in question doesn’t even come close to actually describing the guitar. The main reason for choosing a Rickenbacker is because they look exquisitely cool. And under very certain circumstances they sound good. In that order.

Everything about the look of a 330 is distinctive. The deep, getting close to symmetrical cut-aways in the body shape, the scimitar-styled sound hole, the ‘R’ tail-piece and the contouring it’s set in, the split-level scratch plate arrangement, and of course the iconic sweeping logo on the headstock. Nothing else quite looks like one, and that even includes any of the copies.

When I was 12 or 13, I met the implausibly charismatic, and by his own admission, incredibly good-looking, David Greenfield. The same age as me, he’d somehow managed to pack rather more into his life than I’d managed to achieve, which included some basic knowledge of female anatomy, but more importantly a Jam gig in Newcastle, when they were touring All Mod Cons. I think at this point in my life I still thought that Some Girls by Racey was the acme of rock and roll, so I was set to get a fast-tracked musical education.

David seemed to have a wardrobe basically modelled on the inside sleeve photos of Paul Weller from the Sound Affects album – all groovy jackets with dapper little stripes, whilst I had a school uniform and a couple of pairs of Millets jeans. Collectively, we must have looked like a scene from Gregory’s Girl. In the summer of 1981, not having released an album that year, The Jam embarked on the Buckets and Spades tour of costal towns, taking in the St Austell Coliseum in Cornwall. David somehow procured the necessary tickets and, more impressively, a lift from someone else’s parents from our backwater in South Devon, to what would ordinarily be a backwater further down the peninsula.

I’d, understandably I think, never been to a gig before and pretty much had no idea what to expect. I guess I was imagining Top of the Pops but a bit louder. After what seemed an eternity of waiting and jostling amongst the mods, skinheads, squaddies and students, the support act’s gear was finally cleared from the stage, the lights went down and John Weller was barking his customary introduction to the band. Before he’d actually got onto the stage, the younger Weller was thrashing out the riff to But I’m Different Now, and as he arrived the band kicked in and I experienced that heart-shaking, bone crunching, stomach churning epiphany that will never quite be captured again. Weller, in a black suit, white shirt, wire thin wielding one of his black Ricky 330s. This visual, visceral and sonic perfection instantaneously forged deep and permanent synaptic pathways across my brain.

So, a few years later, armed with £550 in cash earned from my all too short career as a film extra, I managed to get my friend Paddy to drive me up to Bristol where a shop had two 330s in stock - a black one and a fireglo (that’s Rickenbacker for sunburst). I thought I’d gone there with an open mind, but on seeing the two of them, it just wasn’t close – it had to be the black one.

Having bought the guitar though it took me about another three years to get a decent noise out of it. I already had a Stratocaster by this point, and I found the 330 just about the weirdest thing I’d ever played. The neck is incredibly narrow and feels both delicate and cramped at first. And then there’s the sound – it just does Rickenbacker. Listening back to The Jam now, I’ve got to concede that Weller didn’t actually manage to coax a decent sound out of his Rickenbacker collection very often – there’s the occasional few bars of promise, such as the intro to Man in the Corner Shop, but as soon as he leaves the arpeggios behind more typically it sounds like a cat being strangled, or a Telecaster with knackered strings through a nasty transistor amp.

Once you’ve worked out what the 330 can, but mainly can’t do, it’s a brilliant jangling rhythm guitar with a unique sound. It’s also bizarrely well-built and robust given its looks – twenty-odd years on and a fair few gigs behind it and mine still plays superbly. The action is lightening quick, the intonation is perfect and the twin truss-rods have kept the wafer-thin neck absolutely true.

For a better idea of how good a Rickenbacker can sound, doing what it does best, Johnny Marr is the far better British exponent of the instrument – and there are a few clips to be found online to prove the point.

David and I drifted apart in the post-Jam years, when he joined the Royal Marines and I headed off to university in London. He was a huge part of my teenage years, and even though I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years when he committed suicide in the early 90s, it felt like a massive loss. I don’t think David ever saw my 330, which is a shame because he’d have loved it. It’s all so vivid, but it’s more than a lifetime away.

BB1100s

Some possessions you pursue with a passion. Others find you. The Yamaha BB1100s sits defiantly in the latter category.

Made, I would guess, in the mid 1980s, this is the Japanese company’s take on the classic Fender bass designs. Its sleek body horns make it look rather dated these days, but in the hands of a New Romantic, given to the odd slap and ping, it would have looked quite the part.

The combination of two pickups and active circuitry mean that the bass is nothing if not adaptable, with a big tonal range on offer. In truth, the active circuitry hasn’t really stood the test of time and the instrument sounds better played passively, but overall it still plays and records very well. The relatively thin neck still allows for a very playable low action, though it did need a sizeable truss-rod tweak from Graham in Andy’s Guitar workshop in the mid noughties to correct a pronounced forward bow. Since then it’s survived rather better than Andy’s.

I bought the BB1100s in ’88 or ’89 from Tony Conlon. I first met Tony in 1985 during the filming of Revolution, the American War of Independence movie starring Donald Sutherland and Al Pacino. Critically panned and equally unloved by the paying public it gets the odd airing these days on those non-premium movie channels on your Sky box. It really was that bad. When I say that I met Tony in 1985 - that is perhaps over-stating the case. Truthfully, I stepped over him, or around him to be more specific.

Tony and I had both landed roles as extras in the film, along with several hundred otherwise equally unemployable Plymothians. There was big money on offer – if I remember rightly about £35 a day. Now, for someone like Tony who had been signing on prior to the arrival of Goldcrest Pictures in the city, this represented riches beyond compare. Unfortunately after 3 days on set and 3 sleepless nights fuelled by incredibly cheap alcohol, Tony’s body rebelled and shut down. Of course, I didn’t know he was Tony at this point, I just saw a very pale Goth who looked seriously ill.

I next met Tony about a year or so later. He played in a band with a keyboard player called Simon who ran the high-tech department of City Music in Plymouth. I was a regular loiterer in the shop – lots of interest, but no money to spend on stuff. I got to know Simon, and then Tony, and later joined their band. We played together for about a year with me on guitar, Tony on bass and Simon on a large collection of keyboards, often borrowed from the shop. This was probably during the time when the Yamaha DX7 was at its zenith and our stuff was covered in those very distinctive twinkly synth sounds of the period.

Given that City Music doesn’t appear to exist any longer, and I’m sure the receipts are long since lost, I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences in saying that Simon bought the BB1100s on his staff discount and passed on the savings to Tony. Given that Tony was a recovering Goth, the bass seemed to suit him well – its in-voguish looks and general air of practicality gave the impression that here was a musician ready to move on.

A couple of years later after I’d moved to London, Tony would come up from Plymouth occasionally to play bass on various demos I was working on: an arrangement that no doubt suited me rather better than him. One day though he called me up and offered me the bass for the then knock-down price of £150. He had been tasked by the proto Mrs Conlon to at least contribute a new kitchen table to their new house and he desperately needed the funds. Not that I had £150, but I did have a Marshall amp I never used, and I wanted a serviceable recording bass, so I duly went down Denmark Street and got royally fleeced.

That’s how I’ve come to own a Yamaha BB1100s for the best part of 20 years. If I’d had money to be precious about basses, there’s no way I’d have ever chosen one. It would always have been a Fender Precision - the only consideration would have been which colour. But, as a guitarist who plays a bit of bass, the BB1100s has proved good enough down the years to dissuade me from ever considering replacing it. It’s needed minimal maintenance, and has served me solidly. It didn’t even look out of place when I played a residency in the Club Montepulciano house band. Indeed, the sunburst finish was set off quite well against the high waisted sky blue jackets worn by those of us in the rhythm section.

So, it’s not an instrument to love – and with a name like the BB1100s I’m not sure that even its designers thought that it ever would be. But it found me and I’ve stuck with it. It’s far from a classic, but actually it’s not that bad at all.