4 Track method

[notbillcosby]

Hey everyone! I've recently become enamored with lo-fi recordings, and love finding records that were done on a portastudio. It's so great to hear something with so much character... No sheen of the big studio, just the sounds that were captured in someone's attic/basement/garage/bathroom. I love being able to hear the work that went into recording an album, ON the album. Sure, if I listen to Thriller in headphones, I can hear all the work that went into it, but it's really not the same thing as listening to the struggle that is recording to a 4 track cassette, and imagining the band working in an environment so familiar and similar to my own.

I have 3 different 8 tracks and 1 6-track, and they're a blast to use and offer a ton of different options for how to arrange and bounce tracks and all that. The one that is really intriguing to me, though, is the 4 track. I have a 424mkII, which was actually my first portastudio. I'm 27 and absolutely grew up recording to the computer; All my recording chops have happened with an unlimited track count in front of me. 8 tracks give me enough shuffle room that I need forethought still, but I never feel terribly cramped. The 4 track, though... man! I could understand doing demos on it for myself, or sending 4 tracks of drums to it to bounce somewhere else, or doing a really really basic live recording of a 3-piece with vocals... But people recorded albums to 4 tracks for YEARS AND YEARS that are way way more complicated than that.

So I'm curious, what's everyone's working method for doing a "bigger" project on 4 tracks? I do have several 16 channel boards, so mixing several mics down to subgroups isn't a problem. If you're tracking a band live, would you mix it all ahead of time on the board and send a stereo mix to 2 tracks on the porta, leaving 2 avilable to bounce vocals back and forth? When people are dubbing things in and layering, what's your workflow? Do you bother trying to keep stuff in stereo, or does the amount of bouncing required eliminate most listenable possibilities? There's so many great sounding 4 track recordings, and I'm not sure where the "normal" place to start is. Let me hear about yours!

 

[clivus]

1985-Fostex 4 track cassette rig. Track 1-time code or audio track rendered from midi sequence. Tracks 2-4 guitar, bass, lead vocal, etc. Then bounce audio and rendered midi tracks to hi-fi video deck. Bounce back to fresh section of tape. Add backing vocals extra percussion, etc. Mixdown to hi-fi video (later DAT) deck. I always boosted the highs while tracking and cut them while mixing to lower the noise floor. Big fun in those days!

 

[notbillcosby]

Ah hah... the bounce! Did/does everyone do this, sending the tracks off to another recorder and then back again? That seems like cheating! But, sure, that makes plenty of sense, and makes me feel less dumb for not being able to think through how to do all of this great stuff on a single 4 track deck...

 

[clivus]

Usually only one bounce to Hi fi video and back was acceptable to my ears. More than that created too much noise floor for my taste.

 

[clivus]

Ah hah... the bounce! Did/does everyone do this, sending the tracks off to another recorder and then back again? That seems like cheating! But, sure, that makes plenty of sense, and makes me feel less dumb for not being able to think through how to do all of this great stuff on a single 4 track deck...

Not cheating--It kept you from destroying your original tracks. If you made a sub-mixing mistake you could go back to your original tracks. Ping ponging-would require over-writing your original tracks.

 

[notbillcosby]

Of course! I understand that part of it... Done it on my 8 track even. I only say "cheating" (with a winky face!) because it really gives you more than just 4 tracks at that point. Maybe this is the key I'd been forgetting about when wondering how everyone made great complex recordings on a mere 4 tracks of tape...

 

[clivus]

gotcha. Of course the pros were recording numerous instruments at one pass. Not so us 'one man band' hobbyists.

 

[mcmetal]

Not all 4 track cassettes were equal.My old tascam could only do one track at a time.That required the drums going through a mixer and and only being recorded to one track.Guitars would be two tracks ping ponged and panned left/right to another track.Bass and guitar tracks sometimes had to share some back up vocals.Then main vocals.With every ping pong bounce the quality just went down the drain.
My old 4 track cassette band recordings are horrible for the most part.I see no thrill with the lo-fi.

I've done some mellow clean tunes with my drum machine and the quality was much,much better.Those tunes didn't have vocals and the drum machine was lined in.

I've learned a lot more about recording along the way so i could probably do a much better job these days.I never had the option of recording 4 tracks simultaneously so the drums always suffered and i was left with a lot less control.

 

[VESSEL2020]

mixing several mics down to subgroups isn't a problem. If you're tracking a band live, would you mix it all ahead of time on the board and send a stereo mix to 2 tracks on the porta, leaving 2 avilable to bounce vocals back and forth?

Yes.
98.9 % of all my recordings are done this way.

 

[grimtraveller]

I started off on a 4 track cassette portastudio and nothing on God's earth would make me go back to that. Nothing. Not love nor money nor a couple of electrodes attached to my hardware (or floppy disc, YMMV !), nor a telegram from the Queen or tea with Obama. Not a voice from heaven or the return of communism or an invite to tour with the Stones, not even world peace or my car insurance paid up for the next 40 years {though the latter is tempting.....}.
When I first started doing it, the initial three tracks always sounded good. After a bounce, with the next two tracks filled, things were already sounding, well, just about acceptable. But one bounce after that came the frustration of mush.
Lo fi I don't mind. The frustration of mush and I'm murderous.
After a few months on 4 track I realized that I needed at least four more tracks and I bought an 8 track portastudio (this was in '92). When we read about some of those great 4 track recordings from the 60s, we need to be aware of some realities. The Rolling Stones had the same limiting problems with 4 tracks. Mick Jagger has spoken of how their initial recordings sounded magnificent but as soon as they started bouncing, the impact went. I know what he means. The Who live could get away with 4 track recording. Few others. The Beatles did so much bouncing to get their wonderfully experimental 4 track sounds (and on 'Pepper' slaved 2 4 tracks together on some songs to get 7 tracks) and as soon as 8 track became available, abandoned 4 track. It's not as romantic as it is made to seem. The engineers of those times mixed on the go. Don't forget, each night after the session was done, a quick mix was done and would be given to band members to take home to listen to. That tells you something.
Moving swiftly on !
Even with 8 track, I did lots of bouncing. Sometimes a finished 8 track song would contain as many as 40 tracks, but condensed to 8. 3 or 4 for backing vocals, three or four for guitars, doing things in sections etc. I would nearly always start with guitar/drums, bass/drums, guitar/percussion (bongos or congas or mixed percussion) or more rarely, bass/percussion and work from there. The way I do things, the song absolutely has to feel right from this initial perspective because as I learned long ago, trying to cover up a fundamental glitch doesn't work. Not for me anyway.
Even today with digital 12 track and 238 virtual tracks, I still bounce alot and my recording 'workflow', for want of a better word, hasn't really altered much.
For me, the single most telling piece about 4 track recording is that once 8 tracks became available, four tracks became if not redundant, then let's say 'not widely used'. That all said though, if the number of components going into a song are small, it was a fantastic place to start. My problem was that even before I ever picked up a musical instrument, let alone a recording multitracker, my mind simply did not reside in the 'guitar, bass and drums' simplicity most of the time, though some of my favourite stuff did.