Has anyone read . . .

[famous beagle]

" does the book come with a CD?"

maybe a cassette.

Actually, the old book I have (Musician's Guide to Home Recording) did have a page up front that said there are cassettes available for order that demostrate these concepts in action. The book is years old (I think my copy was printed in '86 or so), so I recently (a few years ago I guess) sent a letter to the address, asking if these cassettes were still available or if they'd upgraded to CDs by chance. I never got a response.

Oh well.

I think I am going to snag this portastudio book though. I love to work in the 4-track cassette medium for some projects.

 

[Beck]

yeah, it seems like you could end up with weird artifacts unless your machine was tip-top on spec... or, no? does anyone do this to improve quality, reduce tape hiss etc.? I'll have just to try it to find out i suppose, but could be interesting on a small width format to double track the most important (whatever's going to be mixed loudest) tracks. anyone tried that or the above mentioned simulated 1/2" master 'trick'?

Are there problems with this other than "it wouldn't really be the same width as a real 1/2" half track because of the gaps between"?

The whole point is that the author of said book is mistaken about thinking that any amount of individual tracks are equal to one bigger track. It doesn't work that way. You don't get any benefit from recording the same source on two separate tracks... unless you use delay on one track for ADT (automatic double tracking).

There's nothing in this technique that improves sound quality or reduces tape hiss. Since each track is separate with its own recording element everything stays the same. Worst thing is you can get funky phase cancellations by recording the same material on two adjacent tracks.

The author was just plain mistaken in his thinking about how multitrack heads work.

 

[famous beagle]

The whole point is that the author of said book is mistaken about thinking that any amount of individual tracks are equal to one bigger track. It doesn't work that way. You don't get any benefit from recording the same source on two separate tracks... unless you use delay on one track for ADT (automatic double tracking).

There's nothing in this technique that improves sound quality or reduces tape hiss. Since each track is separate with its own recording element everything stays the same. Worst thing is you can get funky phase cancellations by recording the same material on two adjacent tracks.

The author was just plain mistaken in his thinking about how multitrack heads work.

That's what I was thinking. Just not right.

 

[LUNE]

The whole point is that the author of said book is mistaken about thinking that any amount of individual tracks are equal to one bigger track. It doesn't work that way. You don't get any benefit from recording the same source on two separate tracks... unless you use delay on one track for ADT (automatic double tracking).

There's nothing in this technique that improves sound quality or reduces tape hiss. Since each track is separate with its own recording element everything stays the same. Worst thing is you can get funky phase cancellations by recording the same material on two adjacent tracks.

The author was just plain mistaken in his thinking about how multitrack heads work.

yeah, that would've been my guess - though I sometimes fantasize about how it would have been cool if someone made a multitrack recorder with different sized track widths - say you had a 1/4" 6 track tape recorder with half the tape width occupied with two tracks and the other half with four - using the two wide tracks for important stuff: you could have voice & main instrument on the wide tracks & the others for arrangements.... maybe some electro-wiz could build something like this using different heads next to each other? (just muzing of course....)

 

[thunderstation]

i actually have that book - I thought it was pretty good and it answered a lot of my questions - I don't think it's a book for a real beginner, but if you have had some experience in studios it's a pretty good book. another one to consider is "Using your Portable Studio" by Peter McIan- since i do everything on a porta-studio (tascam 488) i found that partcular book more informative and more of what I was looking for.

 

[evm1024]

plus when you use more than one track to record a signal youu get more noise added in from the electronics of each channel. Yous signal to noise ratio suffers.

Ethan

 

[lo.fi.love]

.... and if you master that way, good luck finding a cd / tape duplication house or pressing plant that will be able to play it back properly.