what gear did you start out with when getting into recording?

I'll go first:

Shure SM57 (still own it)
Focusrite Trakmaster Platinum - Vocal & Instrument Channel Strip
Boss 532 digital 4 track recorder
Squire guitar
Squire bass guitar
Behringer C3
Boss DR-770 drum machine
Edirol MA-10A

oh and it all had to be synced via midi and would go out of sync sometimes,

fun times! even with all them limitations I made some of the best music I've ever made and had a lot of fun,

this was all in the early 2000s when I started out.

Sm57, an electret hi impedance “Lafayette” condesse from an old radio and a tascam 4 trk portastudio.

I got a ton of mileage out of that rig. Later on I met a buddy whose father had a home studio with a TAC scorpion and a 2” 3m 16trk. We got to learn how to use all that and then when ADAT came out they replaced the 2”. This was all as a teenager in the 90’s.

Mid-to-late 90s:
Yamaha MT4X 4-track cassette
Radio Shack Hi-Z mic (can't remember name)
Tascam M308B mixer at some point
First "real" mic: Electro-Voice PL80 (which I still have! We'd fight over which instrument got this illustrious treatment) and a Beta 58.
Bought an Audio-Technica handheld vocal mic that the grill fell off almost immediately. That was a snare mic for a long time.
Win95 "DAW", probably running Soundforge with a Soundblaster AWE32 card to bounce back and forth.
Remember using SEQ-303 by Techno Toys and Rubber Duck.
Probably ACID Pro at some point around then too. Cool Edit Pro too.

Those are good mics! I had a few around until recently. Solid in the PL line tradition.

My first setup was two cassette machines. Probably Sony. The system... we'd record drums on L and bass on R in one pass, then bounce those to one track of the other machine while laying down guitar. Then bounce back to first machine to lay vocal, and we were done.

For mics, my granddad gave us two Unidyne III's from the club where he worked the PA, and they came with a little Westrex mixer, that I want back! I recall what a PITA it was getting everything wired up, but we conquered it with grandad's help. No idea where it ended up.

I'm sure that there was some Radio Shack gear involved in some capacity also. Everybody had Radio Shack gear.

Many long days and nights recording into Guitar Tracks Pro with a Shure PG48 for me

Haha, truly the first equipment I used for recording the very first raps in the 90's was some gooseneck computer mic into Soundblaster 16 sound card. Golden times in the life of teenage Asno. First real mic was Shure SM58. I still hooked it in SB16 and always wondered why it sounded like ****.

an electrodyne console about 2 dozen 87's... 8 u47's a dozen km 84's ..3 bk 5's... 12 57's ..4 re 20's ... 8 414's .. a 1/2 dozen re 15's ..1/2 dozen c 38's ..4 633a's ..1 u47 tube ... a 666.. 8 451's a dozen rca 77dx's 2 d200e's....a few la4's a tube stereo plate and 2 solid state mono plates ..2 m79's and a few ampex 440 2 tracks LOLZ..sometimes nepotism is wonderful!

A Tascam DP008, a Shure Sm57, and a Art MP/C mic pre and compressor I forget what the “monitors” were. The stereo was for listening, not monitoring, and the laptop wasn’t hooked to anything until I wanted to transfer from the Tascam.

Shure sm57, m-audio 2496, a tascam four track and some rented condensers, nady drum mics.

Recorded my first bands first ep with that. This was 2003. We used cool edit pro (now adobe audition).

A Wollensak and the mic that came with it.

A Fostex 250 4 track recorder.
1970's Fender Jazz bass
Washburn HM 20V model, the same guitar in the Addicted to love video by Robert Palmer. I had mine first!!
6 sm57's
Marshal 50W combo
Ampeg Bass Stack

1981: Consumer cassette decks overdubbed on to one another back and forth.
1983: Same but with hifi VCRs and Betamax machines.
1984: Tascam 8-track open reel.

All uphill from there....

there was a huge gap between the gear i STARTED with and the gear i OWNED:

- the former was owned by the national broadcasting company, was intended for recording/mixing/broadcasting of large orchestras (and all sorts of smaller ensembles), was installed in a very nice and huge studio (which today gets used as a live venue with a max. capacity of 1250 people) and included pretty much everything you can think of which was nice and expensive: think of dozens of tube mics and the latest sdc's, studer desk and tape machines, la2a/1176/1178 and some siemens and calrec gear, emt and quantec efx, reverb chambers, k+h speakers etc. :-)

- the latter was a bunch of second-hand gear bought on the fleamarket and some more or less useful cheapo pieces inherited from a hifi enthusiast: the gear was more intended for 'studio' use but we played some live shows with it (with catastrophic results) and consisted of two sennheiser dynamic mics, a cassette desk, a heavy but not so powerful amp, two speakers (with one tweeter blown), a peavey desk with a built-in spring reverb but broken pots and scratchy faders :-(

Wrote my first songs with a $100 guitar, and one of those five dollar bug sized microphones, beige color, plugged it straight into the beige colored tower computer, and recorded in Windows Recorder, which you have to re-start every 60 seconds if you want to keep going.

Absolute garbage. The noise floor sounded like a bad answering machine.

Very quickly upgraded to an SM58, RE11, Studio Projects B1, and an AT3035, with an Aardvark Q10 interface and a better computer.

Already had some pretty high end electric guitar gear. Vintage guitars and amps, and so on, and a nice USA stratocaster. Some questionable version of Cubase, and tons of free plugins.

This is circa year 2001. There's a Tascam Porta One that gets used too, but it wasn't the true beginning for me, other than bizarre tape loops and one song called the "Potato Song" that may or may not still exist on a cassette tape somewhere with someone that won't speak to me. It was inspired by Creed.

About 10 years ago.

MBox 1
ProTools 8 LE
2x Karma K10 mics.

Little portable cassette recorder. Started recording myself as a little kid singing along or banging on stuff with LPs.

^^
Mine was stereo.





Later, Teac V-8030 S.
Much later Rode NTK, Roland 2480 CD...still use it:

1978
Shure SM5b / OC White boom
Cetek Broadcast rotary mixer- 8 channels with two mic pre's built in.
Otari 2 track tape deck (2)
Russco Turntable
Panasonic cassette recorder

Four years later I upgraded to an Otari 8 half inch 8 track and two MTR 10 dubbing decks.

I feel old now.

Me too. At the point where I got my Mbox I had already done tape, ADAT, AMS AudioFile and Fairlight. But that was all with other people's money.

I started recording my own songs in my middle-school years in the 80s. Got paid under the table to wash dishes at a Greek restaurant, and every dollar of it went to the music store down the street or to Radio Shack.

My starting gear:

• Synth: Roland Alpha Juno 1
• Drums: Roland TR-505
• Mic: unpowered mic from Radio Shack
• Mixing: A couple of guitar-pedal sized resistance mixers and a LOT of 1/4"/RCA adapters and splitter cables. Also had a Radio Shack mic amplifier that had some very retro delay and reverb effect.
• Recording: 2 hi-fi cassette decks
• Effects: Alesis microverb

I recorded probably a dozen songs with the above gear. Would lay down a bass or drum track first, and then do a cycle of dubs where I'd mix all previously-recorded tracks on the left channel with the new track on the right. each song generally had 5-6 tracks total; all played/recorded live. a mistake either meant i'd have to start all the way from the beginning or just live with the mistake in my song.

The songs are virtually unlistenable now simply due to the quality, but some of the individual songs actually weren't bad. I re-recorded one a couple years ago; hope to revisit others later.

sooo long ago...

a cassette recorder, a Commodore 64 and a cheap ibanez guitar.
sounded like ****e, slowly improving...

it started as a hobby in high school in late 80s, but first little scoring gigs, for documentary films, came in early 90s. some even got payed. at the time i had:

spirit folio/yamaha km 802
behringer composer - for 2bus
sony dat & revox a77
ibanez digital delay pedal
alesis microverb iii
pentium running cubase
emu e6400 sampler
roland jd990 synth
roland jx10 analog
yamaha dx7


actually dat and folio were on long term loan from a friend. with better paid gigs i could sometimes afford to do mixdowns in proper studios, with adats and lexicons.

I'm with you brother.

I pulled up some old 4-track cassette tapes from like 30 years ago, and was like, "wow, these sound good! Obviously the 1000s and 1000s of hours on here and dollars spent wasn't the answer".

The year was 1979 . . . .

Teac 2340 4 track
Teac 3300 half track (for Mastering! )
Tangent 802 mixer with rotary pots and built-in spring reverb
Ashly SC 50
Sm 57s
AT 802 omnis

Late 90's...

Guitar Tracks Pro II
Unknown sub $20 dynamic microphone
Soundblaster Live

As flash as a rat with a gold tooth

Ampro 757 I got in 1950's.

Did it have a tube as the vu meter where the side of the tube lit up?

No idea. It looked like this one...

The studio manager just borrowed one of those for a tape transfer. Our other machines don’t do 3.75ips.