Sony TC-366 and Sound on Sound
- Thread starter dgvc63
- Start date
jpmorris
Tape Wolf
Looks like this deck works by copying from left to right, or right to left, while also mixing in the new recording. It might be able to do independent L/R recording as well, mind you, but you would then only have the two inputs to play with.
The true sound-on-sound mechanism works like this:
Say you were going to record drums, bass, vocals and keyboards, in that order (realistically you'd probably add the vocals last since the last track will be the most distinct and the others will lose fidelity).
1. Record drums to left track.
You now have a blank right track, and drums on the left
2. Copy drums to right track, while playing bass
The right track now consists of combined drums and bass, the left track has just the drums
3. Copy right track to left, while singing the vocals
The original drum track on the left has been erased and replaced with a combined track of drums, bass and vocals. The right track is drums and bass
4. Copy left track to right, while playing the keyboards
The right track now contains the entire ensemble, the left track has drums, bass and vocals.
At this point you would copy the right track to your master tape or digitize it or whatever - that will be the finished version of the song. However you could keep bouncing back and forth until the sound quality turns to mush.
There are a number of obvious drawbacks to doing it this way - firstly, it's mono.
Secondly, although you can do a retake if one of the channel bounces goes wrong, you won't be able to go back and fix it after the second bounce because you'll have erased the original source track.
Thirdly, each bounce will add more hiss and generally the quality will deteriorate - the earliest tracks will get pushed further and further back, and the fact that it's a quarter-track stereo machine won't help either because the tracks are half as wide as they would be on a half-track machine and will lose fidelity more quickly.
Once proper multitrack machines became affordable, people dropped the old sound-on-sound technique like a hot potato. But until then it was quite popular with home recordists - 'Ithaca - A Game For All Who Know' was done in a similar manner (they bounced between two stereo decks), and by careful track ordering (bass first etc) and the fact that they'd made about 4 other albums that way beforehand, they were able to get quite a remarkable sound quality out of it. (Peter Howell being an experienced BBC engineer probably helped too)
The true sound-on-sound mechanism works like this:
Say you were going to record drums, bass, vocals and keyboards, in that order (realistically you'd probably add the vocals last since the last track will be the most distinct and the others will lose fidelity).
1. Record drums to left track.
You now have a blank right track, and drums on the left
2. Copy drums to right track, while playing bass
The right track now consists of combined drums and bass, the left track has just the drums
3. Copy right track to left, while singing the vocals
The original drum track on the left has been erased and replaced with a combined track of drums, bass and vocals. The right track is drums and bass
4. Copy left track to right, while playing the keyboards
The right track now contains the entire ensemble, the left track has drums, bass and vocals.
At this point you would copy the right track to your master tape or digitize it or whatever - that will be the finished version of the song. However you could keep bouncing back and forth until the sound quality turns to mush.
There are a number of obvious drawbacks to doing it this way - firstly, it's mono.
Secondly, although you can do a retake if one of the channel bounces goes wrong, you won't be able to go back and fix it after the second bounce because you'll have erased the original source track.
Thirdly, each bounce will add more hiss and generally the quality will deteriorate - the earliest tracks will get pushed further and further back, and the fact that it's a quarter-track stereo machine won't help either because the tracks are half as wide as they would be on a half-track machine and will lose fidelity more quickly.
Once proper multitrack machines became affordable, people dropped the old sound-on-sound technique like a hot potato. But until then it was quite popular with home recordists - 'Ithaca - A Game For All Who Know' was done in a similar manner (they bounced between two stereo decks), and by careful track ordering (bass first etc) and the fact that they'd made about 4 other albums that way beforehand, they were able to get quite a remarkable sound quality out of it. (Peter Howell being an experienced BBC engineer probably helped too)