Kickstarter

Day one started off rough. The DAT player I borrowed from Phil was producing errors on every tape a put in it. Enter Google. I found out that one of the bad, bad, bad, things about DAT is that over time the tapes lost compatibility and rarely play back on anything other than a machine similar to what they were recorded on. so, that just wasn't going to work.

A while back, when my friend Ned moved to Scotland he left me with a bunch of stuff he couldn't bring himself to throw out. One of the things he left me with was a Tascam DA-30 mkII. The same model I'd used to do all of this recording. It was broken and I'd tried to fix it a few times already. An hour later, by doing things like taking belts off, cleaning them, using a lighter to create enough heat to tighten them - stuff I have no business doing - I fixed it. It's not perfect. It makes funny noises and probably won't last more than a week - but the tapes play back perfectly. 

So here's what I found on the first few tapes. Optima. No Daughter Icon. Rigor, This Shall Not Breathe, Cold Magnetic Sun, Wear, Grain, Unclean, Antibody, and a few unreleased tracks. As I expected, most of them are completely submixed. Instead of finding a lead vocal, I'm finding submixes of 4-5 vocal tracks. Instead of individual synths, I'm finding  submixes of the music with no guitar or vocals. My choice now becomes redo the whole thing or work with what I have. I'm leaning heavily towards working with what I have and re-tracking only the essentials. I'd love your opinions. I'll sleep on it. ; ) That sleeping will start NOW. (Slept 3 hours last night, worked on this for 13 hours today.)