What a beauty!!

I managed to buy this TEAC A3440 at local auction site… it was listed once for NZ$500/US$300 – no one bid & I forgot to set a reminder… Relisted and I bought it for NZ$665/US$400 which still seems ridiculously cheap especially as its been recently serviced!

I’ve wanted one of these for about 3 decades now. The earlier model A3340 is infamous in NZ due to the legend Chris Knox owning one & it being used for a lot of early Flying Nun releases… and a bit later, Knox using it for Tall Dwarfs, his duo with Alec Bathgate eg this track with the strange tape loop & hand made video:

Can’t wait to start messing with four track tape loops… Printing quad recordings or stems at 15ips and replaying at 7.5… saturating tape experiments etc etc…

Back in the day, I applied to the Christchurch Arts Council for funds to record our bands songs and Hamish Kilgour (RIP) was the Council coordinator at the time who got our application approved. So our live engineer rented a desk & mics from a friendly PA company and we converted our shared house into a recording studio for a weekend. And the recorder we used was an A3340 which I rented from a dodgy character… I can still rememebr going to pick it up, with $50 cash for the rental… and noticing the spoons & needles on their kitchen gas hob… The late 80s were the bad old ‘homebake’ days in CHCH…