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Introduction

​The sound engineers who did the Full Instrumental Musical Breakdown on Page 8 were also tasked to examine the nuts and bolts of the recording and production of the original LTL cassette—with an eye to any factors which could help pinpoint the recording's years. Basically, they said it was "not too bad" for a non-recording-studio effort. They called it semi-professional.

​Of course, the worst interference was the tape degradation between whatever had been its original master medium and the 2nd? 3rd? generation YT download they had in hand. In the end, it basically came down to educated guesswork.

​I did a bit of garage recording in my late teens—the early 70s—and I well remember garages and sheds with floors, walls, and ceilings double-covered with carpet and egg cartons glued on top. ANYTHING to deaden a room for the straight sound. Liveness and effects were added later. In those days, the music world was basically recorded by way of three still-infamous microphones:

​Shure SM57 for instruments; the Shure SM58 for vocals; the Sennheiser 421 for bass drums.

​They were all good for live performance and any semi-professional home recording projects. But I digress.

​Instruments and Channels

​First, the technicians assessed the number of possible mixing and recording channels inside the song. They speculated on the likely recording equipment used -- judging from the audio results they were hearing through top-quality speakers and filtered though audio processing software well above my pay grade.

​Total Confirmed Instruments

​In total there are 6-7 possible line inputs:

• ​Drums: 1 mic each drum, or a single overhead to the mixing console.​
• Bass guitar: 1 mic from amp to desk.
• Rythym guitar: 1 mic from sound hole to desk. ​
• Lead guitar: 1 mic from amp to desk. ​
• Main vocal: 1 mic straight to mixer or sharing the guitarist's amp. ​
• Harmony vocal: 1 mic channel to desk.

​Some might think -- "But why not patch the instruments directly into the mixing desk?" Answer: Because that would then require headphone foldback channels, adjusted for each player. That's way too tricky for this little garage session.

​Given the imperfections within the final master, they concluded it was improbable that this band had 8 mixing channels for one straight live take. If they only had a 4-channel mixing desk, they had to do at least two takes. A 4-channel mixer was common and used by any 4-piece band for small live gigs.

​The engineers deduced that firstly drums, bass, rythym guitar, and maybe voice were mixed to one master channel. The second laydown was lead guitar and harmony vocals onto the second master track ... including some tambourine mic-spill! Those two laydowns would go easily onto a 1/4", 2-channel reel-to-reel tape recorder. From that master were dubbed the cassette demo tapes.

​To this day, I wonder what happened to that master tape. Did it get wiped to be recycled by its owner once the demo cassettes were made? Or is it languishing some 55 years later in some granny's attic in a box of youthful mementos?

​Tape Noise

​When I emailed with the tape's finder, he said he first found the cassette tape in the mid-80s and only digitised it to MP3 around 2000. He didn't upload it to YouTube until 2019. So the original song recording is now a 3rd generation low-fidelity copy of a degraded low-fidelity source!

​The residual tape hiss on the recording would have been due to several factors, the greatest being a recording preceding the widespread use of Dolby noise reduction technology. Dolby B was introduced for high-end open-reel recorders in 1968, but didn't become a standard feature in consumer cassette decks until the early-to-mid 70s. Dolby C only arrived in high-end equipment in 1981.

​Conclusion

​When taking all these technical limitations into account—the specific microphone era, the 4-channel mixing constraints, and the absence of noise reduction technology—it becomes increasingly difficult to justify a recording date any later than the turn of the decade. This was a snapshot of a specific analog moment, captured on equipment that was common and accessible between 1968 and 1972. While the cassette was discovered in the mid-80s, every sonic fingerprint left on the tape points to a session that occurred more than a decade prior. LTL is not an 80s production or even a 70s one; it is a late-60s demo that simply took the long way to find its audience.