B
Beck
Guest
In answer to this and a few other posts I'll say the following:
Lets reintroduce the original premise, which I think we might split into two questions or more.
1. Can one achieve professional results using cassette multi-track?
ANSWER: Yes, because it has been done. It's not a hypothetical unless the reader is very young or maybe older but missed the golden era when we pushed narrow track technology, including cassette, with extraordinary results in the 1980’s. But keep in mind all cassette multi-tracks are not created equal.
To be fair there was a certain breed that used the portastudios to great effect -- the engineer/composer/musician types like me. I had friends that worked in commercial studios that never explored the home studio concept at all because they weren't musicians.
I started recording professionally in the late 70’s in A/V in a TV studio, but my first home studio was built around the TEAC 144 about a year or so after it was introduced. It was awesome, but the Tascam 244 and 246 to follow were even more awesome.
Back then portas were used for many things… experimenting, demos, TV/radio spots, and commercially released songs/albums. And yes people did pay professionals to record them on portastudios (They paid me). But I was paid, not for what I had or didn’t have, but because of what I could accomplish with it.
The key word here is ‘Professional’, which I think we can agree in this context would be someone that knows what the hell they’re doing with what they have. I knew plenty of people with portastudios that couldn’t get anything out of them because they hadn’t mastered the fundamentals of recording, or just weren’t cut out for it. They wouldn’t have gotten anything out of a 24-track Studer 827 either.
People create the magic with the machine. The machine is not magic. Just hand one of Eddie’s guitars to the 83-year-old church organist at first Lutheran in Kalamazoo and ask her to play ‘Eruption.' It's Eddie's guitar, but it ain't Eddie (might look like Eddie though)
Back in the day there might be a handful of people in a given area that owned cassette multi-tracks that could actually use them effectively. In the 80’s I lived in a metro area with about 200,000 people. There were portastudios from Tascam, Fostex, Yamaha, etc, flying off the shelves of several local music stores. However, there were only a handful of us that people sought out for serious recording projects. I did some of my best work with a Tascam 246.
That brings me to the other part of the question…
2. Can the reader use a cassette multi-track with professional results?
Depends on the reader… What do you know about recording? Can you achieve professional results with capable equipment that rises to the level expected in your particular genre of music?
Another reason I and others like me that had access to pro equipment liked the early portas is because we were artists ourselves. Inspiration strikes at about 2:00 AM for a lot of us. It may not last the time it takes to get dressed and drive across town (the next town in my case). In fact the home environment was less stressful to me as an artist and to clients who liked the casual atmosphere… plus my little sister who liked to hang around was HOT, if I do say so myself… and that didn’t hurt business either.
In summary all you need are:
- Natural ability
- A grasp of the fundamentals of recording (Spend more time reading and less time on web forums)
- Using that knowledge and good judgment to select the better of the cassette species for your purposes. (Hint… they don’t make them anymore)
- Tape selection (one of the most important, but overlooked)
- Good maintenance practices (I cleaned heads, tape path, etc: degaussed; used a mini-vac and compressed air on my 246 before each session).
- A hot sister
