Commencement - My Analog (Mis)adventures

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.