Please help a confused newbie

[Cemetary Crows]

I'm an amateur home recording fantatic, (very amateur). I have a Tascam Porta 02 and a Nady MM4 Mixer. I can't figure out how to master a recording. I recorded the tracks straight into the 4-track and then threaded them through the mixer. The problem is that I read in a book on home recording that you put the signal through the mixer first then into the 4-track. I might be misunderstanding the book though. If anyone can explain the best route to take or maybe give a link to a diagram on the internet I would really appreciate it. Thank you in advance.
--Derek

 

[regebro]

You do both. When you record it into the 4-track, you also automatically go through the mixer, right?

It seems to me you are doing things correctly.

 

[AlChuck]

Cemetary Crows,

The book that confused you basically means that you usually have a mixer in front of a multitrack tape machine. You can consider that the Porta 02 is both the mixer and recorder in your scenario.

I presume there are at least 4 inputs, and you can record onto four channels of the cassette tape at a time. I suspect that what you want to do is make some sort of stereo master of what you have on the 4-track, so you can play it on a standard cassette deck, make an audio CD or an MP3 file or whatever. Again, the Porta 02 has a pair of stereo outs. You would route these into whatever you want to use to record your stereo master -- a standard cassette deck or a stereo soundcard on a computer, or whatever. You can use the NADY in this scenario, but it's not really necessary. One might argue that adding it to the signal path will do little but slightly degrade the sound you're getting straight out of the Porta 02.

The NADY might be useful as a submixer -- for example, to mix four mic signals together into one that you can then send into one of the inputs on the Porta 02, in the case that you might have more simultaneous sources than the Porta 02 has inputs.