A cassette has "60 minutes" of recording time - really 30 minutes each direction. The portastudio records in one direction, at double speed, giving 15 minutes of recording. So I'm going to maximize my one cassette.
"Miss Domingo" was track #8 in our 1996 album, inspired by the band Toto's penchant for making songs about girl's names. Here's the original recording :
Compared to the first four-track demo, the only cheat I did here was to program a drum machine, using an "analog modelling" drum machine this time.
Track 1 - drums, electric piano, organ
Track 2 - background vocals , guitar
Track 3 - lead vocals. guitar
Track 4 - bass
Gear used :
The drum machine is a Korg ER1, a wonderful sounding machine that doesn't pretend to be real drums
The organ is a Voce MicroBii, a "clonewheel" (copy of a Hammond B3) I bought from Seoul last year
The electric piano is from the Yamaha AN1x, another "virtual analog" machine
I purchased a bunch of high bias type 2 cassette tapes five years ago, hoping to use them for demos on my badly scarred Yamaha MT8x. I figured I'd buy four or five, as this is an anachronistic medium and will be gone in a few years.
Dang, I hate it when I'm right
I got to use one, promptly forgot about the rest, then went back to digital recording.
Now with a shiny new Portastudio, I can't find the tapes anywhere. And I made some feeble attempts to find some in stores, but failed.
Aaaaaarrrrrrgggh!
I'll just have to buy from EvilBay, which will make Mr. Customs Guy happy.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2047675.m570.l1311.R5.TR11.TRC1.A0.H0.Xblank+cassette+tapes+high.TRS0&_nkw=blank+cassette+tapes+high+bias&_sacat=0&_from=R40
(this is the part where I say @$*&*&#%^ you Customs, but that's another story)
I got excited about putting the Tascam through its paces, that I went ahead and recorded a demo of one of my band's old songs. I did forget to do two things :
1. Clean the tape heads
2. Get new blank cassette tapes. This might be a challenge anyway (who else still use them?). I used an old tape, and it shows on the recording -- there is a lot of sound degradation.
"Sleeping With The Lights On" is the title track of our 1996 album. Here's the recorded version http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=357691
(which I now realize is at a break-neck fast tempo)
And here's the 4-track tape demo, which I completed in about two hours https://soundcloud.com/rommel-carrera/sleeping-4track-demo
Track 1 - sequenced drums, piano, synths, organ, and crunch guitar (played live)
Track 2 - lead vocals
Track 3 - backing vocals and clean guitar
Track 4 - bass
It seems strange dedicating one track to bass, but it seems to be the best way to do four-track. The Beatles did it in both Revolver and Sgt Peppers.
And a little tour of the gears used:
The drums sounds, piano and organ came from an Emu Proteus keyboard (actually an XK1 synth with the techno card replaced by Piano, Organ and Proteus cards). The yellow mustard color helps immensely :
A "techno" synth turned into a roots rock keyboard
The sequencer is an Emu XL7
The guitar is an Epiphone Casino, the Beatles guitar during their most creative period (1966-1969)
And the bass is a hohner headless (shown here with the Steinberger Spirit)
The Tascam 424 was my first ever multitrack recording device. Here's a rare photo - with a Roland D5 and an Alesis MMT8 - that was all the gear I had in 1991
The Roland sounded much better than Lumanog guitars!
Fast forward a few decades, and here's the 424 Mark 3. This is a rather curious release from Tascam, in 2001, when hard disk recording was already becoming cheap. I just got this today, a bit pricey for what it is but the unit is in excellent, almost new condition
Feed me some magnetic tape!
I'll do a trial run in a few hours, I just need to re-learn (or re-plan) the analog workflow.
I'm not a professional musician by any stretch of imagination. But I do have a strong interest in music, play in a band, and can fake my way through singing, playing guitar, keyboards and composing songs. A band I've played with had a major label album in the 1990s where I composed all ten original tracks, played keyboards, sang vocals and generally made a mess.
This blog will be about recording music using the analog medium - analog tape on a cassttte multitrack. I started with the tascam 424 in the early 1990s, and used that to make demo tapes of the original songs we played as a band. Our commercial album was also recorded on analog tape- a 24 track machine, but mixed to digital.
For the novices, this is analog :
yes it's a cassette tape!
And this is digital :
Reaper asking if I want to buy the software as I've been evaluating this since the presidency of Gloria
I was probably one of the earliest adopters of affordble digital multitracks and PC recording - the free Cool Edit software looked awesome (but slow) in 1998. Then I got a free legal copy of Cubase (which came with the purchase of a Korg X5) in 1999; and , ahem, a try-before-you buy copy of Cakewalk Pro9.
DAW (digital audio workstation) softwares are great - easy to use, fast to make music with. You can whip up a reasonably good sounding demo with loops and softsynths (assuming you have ready ideas). You can have a half-cooked idea, record some phrases and come back later to complete the song. Or come back later and over-produce the song.
A 4-track tape machine has limitations. Only 4 -tracks(duh) vs the virtually unlimited tracks of DAWs. You have to make decisions early on which instruments go to which track. You can't copy-paste your perfect "guitar riff" or vocal chorus every 16 bars- you have to play or sing them through. Hiss, noise vs the clinical clean of digital.
Even with these limitations :
The greatest rock album of all time was recorded on a four-track machine. A historic 4-track machine, yes, but still four tracks. But look at how much fun George Martin had with those 4 tracks:
So I'm shunning my desktop PC running Reaper (legal and free!) with a Native Instruments interface. And going back to a Tascam 424 mk3 analog tape track for recording demos and the occassional mushy cover.
