Tascam 388 live recording half dbx, half no dbx..

jimmy1007

New member
Hello all,

A 388 question that could have been talked about before, but i cant seem to find anyone who's done this and if so what the results were!
Im doing live recording of a punk band in a fairly large sound treated room onto my 388 and thinking to have half the tracks with DBX and half without. Something like this..

TRACK 1: KICK, SNARE, OVERHEAD (DBX OFF)
TRACK 2: GUITAR (DBX OFF)
TRACK 3: VOX (DBX OFF)
TRACK 4: BK VOX (DBX OFF)

TRACK 5: BASS DI, BASS AMP (DBX ON)
TRACK 6: ROOM MIC (DBX ON)

Then tracks 7 and 8 il leave for overdubs (DBX ON) with the option of having dbx off on track 8 if i need.

Obviously il have to really watch my levels on the dbx enabled tracks but has anyone ever done anything similar and what sort of results have you got?
Any ideas or tips would be much appreciated!

MANY THANKS!!

Jimmy
 
I've done similar where tracks 1-8 are DBX on and tracks 9-16 are DBX off (on an Tascam MSR-16).

Due to the track count though I had the luxury of recording the stereo drum tracks on both DBX and non-DBX tracks then deciding during mixing which I preferred.

I preferred to keep the bass, drums and guitar tracks free of DBX processing as these sound best to me with tape saturation. Also, the DBX can take away a bit of 'air' from a track so things like acoustic guitars and backing vox generally can sound a bit more open without DBX.

Another thing to try is turning the DBX on while recording then switching it off during playback to get a very compressed and forward sound (this can be an interesting effect for backing vox for example).

Also, I would be putting less critical tracks like bass gtr, kick and backing vox on tracks 1 and 8 (edge tracks) as these are usually the most problematic in terms of dropouts and head wear.
 
^^^ I've done the same on the same machine. DBX, like anything is just another tool to use at your own discretion.
 
I used a Tascam 80-8 in my demo studio many many years ago, and found that very percussive tracks (and particularly tambourine) sounded awful with dbx, so I always turned it off on those tracks.

Looking back now, I suspect that I was probably miking them way too close and getting excessive transients that impacted encoding but were not recorded, thus preventing the decoder from tracking them correctly.

I only do transfers now, and get a lot of half inch 8T and 1" 16T. dbx tapes nearly always sound great, so I think the engineers involved were probably better at recording with dbx than I was all those years ago!

David Ollard
Thin Brown Line
 
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