Quote:
Originally Posted by
Nizzyo
Even more recently I'm experimenting by recording the click and drum tracks to analog tape and tracking
guitars and bass right on my Tascam 388 old school,forcing better takes,then transferring that into Pro Tools.
But that's a whole nother deal in itself I won't get into.
Please get into it! I would like to start doing the same. Send drums from logic to tape and then finish on tape and send the tracks back to logic. What's your formula? I know it's a little off topic but...[/QUOTE]
I can use one recent song as an example. I kind of used Logic along
the way at various points but to get audio to the tape I actually had
to use Pro tools on my old PC using my Delta Card with 8 outputs.
it can work with Logic just the same though if you have the right interface.
I had the idea of doing this down in my head but no songs ready to use
so I grabbed an old demo transferred from a PT session into Logic and
expanded the song out to a couple minutes. I have a method of writing
my songs using 1 bar chords as midi files and using a piano VI of some kind
(Pro tools Velvet in this case,bounced as audio and transferred to logic)
Once the arrangement was down, I had a guide track with chords. I soloed
Klopfgeist and bounced it down as a stereo audio file. I routed EZ drummer
down to 4 channels...Kick, snare and two overheads..and bounced them
as audio files. I now had a click track,electric piano/chord guide track and
4 tracks of drums. To save tape tracks I combined the first 4 bars of the click
with the kick and snare so I would have a count off.
So I now have 5 audio tracks. great!! but my Project mix I/O only has 4
outputs and two of them are for my monitors. I realized I had my delta
card with 8 outputs on my old PC. So I burned the wav. files onto a DVD.
I still had my PT 7.3 on that system plus my license on my ilok so I pulled
the files up in Pro tools and set the routing up for 5 mono outputs.
I have my Delta card hard wired into my Tascam 388 via patchbay so I
spooled up a junk reel,cued it in place,set my levels and hit record.
(the 388 has separate inputs that bypass the mixer and go direct to tape)
I plugged my headphones into the tascam and set up the monitor cue mix
and when I played it back I was impressed with the way the drums sounded
coming off the tape. REALLY punchy! Great! So now I have 3 tracks left
so I setup an all analog chain using a Large condenser>Joe Meek Preamp
patched into the tape track 6 and put down an acoustic guitar. I messed up
the chords but proceeded onward by recording bass guitar direct on track 8.
I was so eager to hear how it sounded I didn't care if the parts were messed up. lol!
Once the tracks were recorded I cued the tape up. The Tascam's direct outs
are hard wired into all 8 line inputs on my Project Mix. I already had a
Pro Tools session setup for 8 tracks of audio ready to go. So I hit record and
pressed play on the 388 and transferred them back in. I chose Pro tools
because I prefer to edit and mix there now 100%.
I found it interesting because I was listening more and even though I
screwed the parts up, I found myself striving more to get them right
and it was nice not staring at a screen the whole time and not having
computer fans whirling cut down on the noise was a bonus. The cool thing
is once i have good takes and they are transferred I can go back and
record more parts along to the same drum tracks on the tape. You just
transfer them all over and line them up according to the click/drum tracks.
They are recorded from the same start point on the tape so the variance
in tape speed doesn't affect it.
I should note that Pro Tools is best for lining things up as you can combine
regions into groups and it makes things easier. Just un-group, delete the duplicates
and your ready to go. It could be done in Logic but not sure if I wanna try it lol!
Sorry for the long drawn out post lol! It was a really complicated way to
go about it but it worked. The process is going to be different now as
I'm going to be running an ADAT interface direct to the 8 track from
the Project Mix. Burning wav files and transferring them to another
computer was a PITA and going back to PT 7.3 from PT 9 is painful
on the eyes lol!
You can certainly do it using just Logic. If you want to record any midi
on top of the tape transfer your grid won't line up so you'll have to
have to do tempo detection/match if you want to quantize and stay
in sync with the metronome.