Dictating machine.

Hmmmm.... damn thing won't upload. Stupid internets! Marvin - are you on the phone again? You're supposed to wait until I'm done using the web. Stupid phone!

Man, I'll tell you - it's not easy living in an abandoned hammer mill. None of the familiar modern conveniences of American life. No wi-fi, no broadband, no blender, no dry ice ... I could go on. But we're used to that sort of thing. As you know, Big Green has always flown pretty low to the ground. That's why so many of our contemporaries have become famous while we remain in the alt-pop toilet. When we go low, they go high. It's like a freaking see-saw. (Did you see what I saw?)

Anyhow, people like us, we learn to do without. When Matt and I were piecing together the first iteration of this band, back in the late seventies / early eighties, we had the cheapest equipment any band ever thought of using. Our PA speakers sounded like kazoos. Our guitar and keyboard amps were underpowered and flaccid. Even worse, we never had anything decent to record on. One stereo reel-to-reel deck followed us around for a while, but it was of little use beyond serving as a tape echo. A friend of our early eighties drummer, Phil Ross, gave us his old dictaphone mono take deck, which we used to record demos of songs we might take into the studio if we could get the scratch together (which we did, eventually).

It took a couple of years, but at some point we moved up to a Panasonic audio cassette deck, the kind that you would use in a home stereo system. We used that and a couple of mics to record ourselves playing in the living room, etc. (Excerpts of those sessions made it on to Matt's very early compilation, "The Todd Family Chronicles".) Matt got a second deck and started bouncing tracks, overdubbing, then around 1985 he bought his first cassette portastudio. That kind of took us to a different place musically, though where that place is, I'm not entirely certain. As we could, we got better gear, but our songwriting and recording process has remained about the same as it was with that first portastudio.

Now we record like everybody else does - on a freaking computer. Fact is, a depiction of pretty much any profession now looks like somebody sitting at a freaking computer.