Quote:
Originally posted by Don
I miss my old porta..I might get one for band rehersal.You can get the Tascam 424 M3 for like 300.00 new..Hmmm Great River frontend..That could be fun |
Its whatever you have sitting around :)
In its prime, I made a custom wiring harness to hook it up to a very used mackie 1604. Felt so bad cutting up a hosa 8 channel snake to make it. Just replaced 4 of the rca's with 1/4 plugs, but it was tampering with a huge investment. Had a DEP5 i picked up "new" (10 year old floor model) for about 125, and had a dbx 266 (the original) stereo compressor. I had 6 samson r11's i picked up for less than the (cheap) mic cables cost, and it was good.
Later i picked up a midiman midi inteface (biport?) that let me stripe and sync an outdated quadra 610 (running the demo/intro version of cubase that came with a keyboard) to timecode on track 4.
After figuring out how to get rid of the ground loop issue (and figuring out what a ground loop was in the first place), bouncing through the mixer back to an open track along with eq, compression, and reverb (and an occasional live part) was the thing to do. After a decade or two of "upgrading" my gear so i could do it like the big guys and not have to commit sounds early as DAW track counts are fairly unlimited, you look back and realize you were doing it right in the first place before you went and made it all complicated.
People that are getting their first experiences on their own with a demo/free DAW are going to be screwed in the long run.
And as something idiotic you can do with a 4 track, i opened mine up, reconnected the cables so it would work, and calibrated the levels so they would playback with the same meter reading as they were recorded. Didn't have a clue what i was doing, but it worked out. Looked at the back page of the manual and induced how to do it. The PC board pots were cleverly labeled, and i got to figure out how the thing worked to boot. About a 1/3 of the way into the process, i panicked after realizing if it didn't work out i was going to really screw the thing up, but it came out okay. Record, playback, tweak, record, playback, tweak, record, playback, tweak. Single head tape machines are time consuming, but it was fun and easy the first time calibrating a 2" with both sel-rep and repro heads. Sure there were more pots to be tweaked, but you had realtime feedback to the adjustments.
Everything i ever needed to know about recording, i learned on my 4 track :)