Though not the first craft I ever used for recording, the 488 was my first love in the recording stakes.
I'd used a Fostex X15 which was good but I learned early on that 4 tracks was never going to do it for me. When a project ended up with in excess of 10 tracks and just sounded like mud, with all that bouncing {Sergeant Pepper it wasn't !}, I figured 8 track was the way to go. A salesman in this second hand musical instrument shop I went into down in Kentish Town gave me some great advice. He said "Whatever you do, don't buy a cassette based 8 track portastudio, they're absolute shit". So I did some research (this was in the summer of '92) and decided that because cassettes were then and still are, my thing, I was going to ignore his advice because it was great advice but it was born of bias, not balance. 18 years on, I still have and use the 488. I've recorded tons of songs on it and learned 75% of what I know on it. That salesman really had his finger on the button ! And he pushed the wrong one on me !
