more tascam 424 help wanted.

[greyJ]

here is the set-up. due to limited musician resources, i am not able to record bass and drums at the same time(on the same track).

so i have been recording the drums first. then bass. then guitar. then doing an internal mixdown(to track 4). but , when bounced like that, everything becomes mono. ( you have to buss all the tracks ) .

i then have my open tracks 1 2 and 3, so i do more guitar, vocals, and then whatever else.

so now i have the mono bass/drums/guitar mixed with the pannable guitar and vocals. that already sounds bad enough. but theres more.

i want to put what i have on the computer, so i can better distribute my electric shit all over the great globe. but when doing this, i have not been able to make it maintain any pan settings, so i am left with one enormous, cluttered, monosaturated wav. file.

if anyone has any ideas , helpful words, or advice on how to make a stereo recording and get it from my 424 to my computer in stereo, please let me know.

[Outlaws]

Originally Posted by greyJ

here is the set-up. due to limited musician resources, i am not able to record bass and drums at the same time(on the same track).

so i have been recording the drums first. then bass. then guitar. then doing an internal mixdown(to track 4). but , when bounced like that, everything becomes mono. ( you have to buss all the tracks ) .

i then have my open tracks 1 2 and 3, so i do more guitar, vocals, and then whatever else.

so now i have the mono bass/drums/guitar mixed with the pannable guitar and vocals. that already sounds bad enough. but theres more.

i want to put what i have on the computer, so i can better distribute my electric shit all over the great globe. but when doing this, i have not been able to make it maintain any pan settings, so i am left with one enormous, cluttered, monosaturated wav. file.

if anyone has any ideas , helpful words, or advice on how to make a stereo recording and get it from my 424 to my computer in stereo, please let me know.

Record drums on tracks 1 and 2 if you have 2 mics. Pan hard left and right. Then if you can, send them to 3 and 4 while also track bass to both tracks so its in the center. You will have to play with the right level a bit since you can't adjust it later. Bass is normally recorded center and mono 99% of the time anyways. Then you can re-track other stuff on track 1 and 2 again.

After that, you will need a computer soundcard with stereo inputs. Otherwise you cannot input a stereo image. Find a friend with that or a friend with a consumer CD recorder on their stereo that you can send mix to.

Thats about the best I can offer other than getting some computer software that lets you mix tracks together. Then you could record 4 tracks, send a stereo mix to the computer, then send a mono mix of that back to one track on the tape (or a new tape for quality) and track more instruments to the mono mix and then send a stereo mix of those 3 new tracks to the computer, and take a program that lets you mix two MP3s together...assume you record them as MP3 fromt he stereo mix.

Make sense?

I hope so. Just reread it a few times. I think I got it down pretty good.

For a computer program, you might wanna check either SoundForge. Also (I think) nTracks is free. So there are two options for that.