Designing a project setup - semi mobile / computerless

J

jennyjewel

New member
I am looking for a setup to track an album over time, via a master session recorded at home and occasional studio dates routed to that master session. In my mind, what this would look like would be a home setup where I could work on my strong suits (guitars, vocals, arrangement, single mic recording) independently over time and which I could route back and forth to a studio for things like a days worth of drums tracking, eventual mixing, etc. If possible, I would prefer the master session / tracking at home to be computerless.

Can it be done? I assume what I am looking for is closest to a pre-DAW mobile recording setup with maybe a few more amenities at home. I am definitely willing to sacrifice some fidelity to get this to work, though I would prefer to aim for a sort of 'mid-fi' rather than lugging a portastudio between locations and endlessly bouncing it down.

I had two ideas: To use ADATs at home and to transfer or record studio sessions to them, OR to use a four track routed into a laptop where the DAW to is just used to arrange busses of tracks, like a second layer portastudio. Some things like guitars I might be more likely to do straight into a DAW instead of via cassette. I would be open to using a computer to transfer the session between home and studio, but the less I use a computer during tracking the better.

Some questions:
  • - How viable would it be to do the entire master session to an ADAT or two, and just bring the units to the studio on the few days I would be there? I have read that they can destroy tapes sometimes and I am unsure how hard difficult they are to set up, two things that give me pause about assuming their mobility.
  • - What would a signal chain look like for either of these set-ups? I already have Logic, an audio interface, mics and monitors that I could use to get started and just potentially update later. I understand I would need to buy a mixer with preamps in addition to an ADAT unit, and I have a specific tape recorder (Yamaha MT4X) in mind if I decide to just use that in tandem with my computer. My budget is around $800-1200 to start with an additional $800-1200 gradually available as I progress through the phases of this project.
To those of you who would urge me to just do it digitally, I would just say that I work a lot better when I'm not staring at a DAW, and that I am not opposed to learning those skills at a later time - however, this is a project set-up, and for the sake of getting into substantive work on this project as soon as possible, these are the parameters I am interested in. This is the same reason I'm not trying to learn reel-to-reel tape while doing this - first and foremost, I want to get to work and I want to actually get this done. Please let me know if you have any questions, and thanks so much!
 
First thing I would say is stay away from tape. Go with a standalone DAW (Zoom, Tascam etc.). Unless you're going to take it or some sort of digital media physically to other recording locations, you're going to need a computer to transfer files anyway, but at least you can avoid it for the actual recording process. Research what standalone DAWs might allow for easy importing of tracks.
 
Hey thank you! I hadn't considered a standalone DAW, I will do some research in this department.

Forgive me for asking though, but how viable are the setups I mentioned? I figured that if I was savvy enough with how I lined up the master recording / four track, I could for instance bring a four track to a studio to record drums to against my master recording (not on the four track) and later export a drum mix from the four track to that master session. This was my original intention, to use an ADAT at home and record drums via mobile session to a four track and then send that mix into an ADAT. I know the computer would be necessary for some parts of this process, but it would still be absent from my tracking process to my master session at home which is my main prerogative.

I don't want to deny a better solution, but this was a setup that I was really intrigued by when I thought of it and I am just curious how much of a headache it might be.
 
Analog tape, especially cassette, doesn't have stable enough speed to make this a reliable process. Maybe you could do it by striping timecode to one track, but that's getting into hardware that's ancient and hard to find, plus you lose one track. ADAT tape systems are only slightly less ancient and unreliable. If I were you, I'd just forget about tape altogether and go digital.
 
I find portastudio's to have enough quirks to just not make it worth the convenience. All of the parts, just not up to grade. Effects and dynamics that are meh, EQ options pretty limited overall and just audio quality in general. Or finding one you can export or import tracks easily. Unfortunately, that's not ever been a thing I've found with them either.

So if I may ask, why computerless?

If you are booking time with a studio in addition to recording at home, you might as well go with a computer and interface. ADAT, where is this idea coming from? So you'll have a recorder but what about the rest? Mixers, pre's and some way to monitor whats recorded while you record additional tracks. That's not going to be exactly simple.
 
I think the goal is not to go completely without a computer, but to have a non-computer way to track at home. A standalone DAW would be okay for that. It should be easy enough to move tracks to the computer for more versatile mixing, and move tracks (or just a reference mix) back for additional tracking.
 
The open ended-ness of a DAW is stifling for me, not to mention the computer screen. My first choice would be tape, but I understand that is expensive and requires a lot of technical knowhow and maintainance that I don't necessarily want to take on. I like how tape sets up clear parameters to work within. This is not a "tape is better" thing but rather something that has just yielded the best results for me in the past.

The standalone DAW idea is intriguing but I wonder if the ADAT process might somehow color the process a bit more uniquely. As for audio artifacts, I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy them and think that an ADAT might yield a higher quality product still containing some artifact-quality than a tape recorder would. Additionally, there are records I like that have been made on ADAT and have made me curious about the format.

One option I am now considering is a standalone DAW as my master session, with an externally engineered "studio" session to a four track which I would send back to my master session. I like tape for drums at least, and have used it in tandem with digital in the past for an effect I enjoy. It is important to note, while I would be booking time, that would primarily be for studio resources, as I am fortunate enough to have good engineers in my life who I know would cut me a deal if I just paid to access the setup.

Thank you for these responses by the way.
 
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ADAT is just a way to record digital. You've got to record the audio (analog) tracks and then A-D them somehow - stand-alone recorder, or AI and computer DAW. All you are doing is adding more steps to get what can be done 'in the box' with a computer. Do you even know a studio who would be willing to do what you are thinking of? Your budget will soon get depleted paying for musicians and studio time to track them if you spend a lot on gear.
 
ADAT would be the worst of both worlds, all the problems of tape, all the limitations of early digital. Cassette 4-track is kind of the worst of analog tape. It can be okay, but there's nothing especially desirable about the sound, and there are plenty of shortcomings.

If you start on a standalone DAW, then bounce to cassette 4-track, it's probable that you'll never really be able to import the results into the original session without insurmountable drift problems. Cassette machines just aren't stable enough for that.
 
I do have musicians (old bandmates, friends) who would be able to play if i asked them to (though i likely will just need one outside musician to play drums and i already have them), and i do know of studios and engineers who would be down to do something like this. Purely from a technical perspective I am wondering how feasible of a project setup this is.

It sounds like a standalone DAW that will allow me to begin a master session without a computer is what I want. I have made recordings in the past where I have recorded to tape, against a digital master recording without previously sending that digital audio to the tape machine to monitor, and then exported those individual tracks into the master session so it was a mix of tape and digital. I think that I will just need to export my standalone unit’s tracks so that an engineer could work on them that way and I will be set.

Just to clarify, s-VHS ADAT does nothing to color digital audio whatsoever? I guess i was under the impression that it was an immense improvement over previous home
systems but that some slight coloration stil may have occurred. Once again, thanks everyone for the responses.
 
You can go to tape then to a new project in the DAW, but if you try to go back into the original project, it will likely drift.

ADAT is just early digital. Along with eliminating analog's problems, it lost all the tonal character. But it's still tape, which is a pain.
 
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