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:
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.