jpmorris
Tape Wolf
That is good insight! I’m thinking I want more of the wide tape width as I’ll be pairing with another tape machine through the MTS-1000. This gives me wider tape to play with for drums, or a beefy synth tone or whatever. Going to experiment. On the other hand it still puts me in a place of limitation which I have grown to love when using tape machines.
I think the 24 may just blow my limitations and need to sync out of the water, as well as give a similar level of fidelity as my 688 due to track width. Well I’m not sure on that but that’s kinda how I see it.
If I were to abandon my other machines and get a console this would make more sense, but I really like recording onto cassette and I have amassed a bunch of blank ones.
Settling on the TSR-8 and hopefully picking up next week!
A lot of my favorite bands used the Otati MX 5050 which seems to be a little bit of a higher grade machine from the TSR-8 but they are comparable and the TSR-8 just fits right into my current tascam set up with the Midi-izer at the center.
Next step is finding the right board for this machine. I’m thinking I’ll go with a rack unit, so my research continues! But I’m in no rush at this point just gonna enjoy the ride
Glad that's helpful! I always wanted to do prog rock and 8 tracks was too limiting for the complex stuff I was trying to do. Before I got the MSR-24 I had two TSR-8s linked together giving me a 14-track setup, but it made mixdown a pain.
What I did with the MSR-24 and still do with the MX-80 is to record everything that's sequenced onto the 24-track, and then do the vocals and bass on the TSR-8, because those are the bits I'm worst at and need a lot of re-takes. The auto-punchin feature of the TSR-8 is a godsend for that. When I'm happy I use the synchronizer to transfer the TSR-8 tracks to 2" for the final mixdown.
If it's a simple song that's going for more of a punk or 60s vibe where 8 tracks is enough, or a necessary limitation to get the period sound, I'll just do it all on the TSR-8 anyway. Where it's just tracking the bass and vocals, I tend to divide the tape up so I can use tracks 1-4 on one song and 5-7 for another song and thereby save tape.
As for commercial use, I notice King Gizzard are doing most of their tracking on a TASCAM 38, though I'm pretty sure they do the mixing in a DAW. Likewise, The Murlocs latest album appears to have been tracked on a TSR-8, presumably so they could play the tape back on the King Gizzard machine.