The technology that we now have at our disposal as musicians is amazing. When I first started recording as a teenager in?the 70s, I felt lucky to have a professional Sony reel-to-reel machine that had an SOS feature: Sound on Sound. This meant that I could record a single track on one side of the stereo tape, and then copy that track over to track 2 while dubbing input for the second track. This still left me with a mono recording, but it was overdubbed with a new layer of sound. The next step was to record the new track two (2 layers) back to track 1 while adding another take … which then created another layer … like having 3 tracks. I could take a couple of stabs at getting the current track right, but once I moved on the the next dub there was no going back because I was always recording over the next-to-last recording. ?I could do 4 or 5 takes, but by then the exponentially increasing?hissssss?was starting to overpower the music.

Jump forward just a few years to the iPad. Garage Band with virtual instruments that can be played with touch sensitivity, eight tracks plus some decent effects. Not a full blown studio, but compared to the old Sony SOS, what an amazing leap into the future.

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