Mike,
The basics of tracking on the 488 come down to 3 basic stages.
The initial stage is to get your bed tracks down on tape. This can be some as simple as a drum machine playing out a pattern to keep you on time and a guitar or keyboard rhythm track to establish the basic Melody and structure of the song you wish to record.
The 488 is a 4 buss system which means you can create up to 4 unique paths to feed any of the 8 tracks of tape on the cassette.
By assigning the drum pattern to buss 1 and 2 on the mixer channel strip and a guitar to buss 3 on it's mixer channel, you can then press the record assign buttons on the right side of the unit by pressing 1 & 2 for the drums and 3 for the guitar.
On the mixer side, adjust your levels and tones to get each instrument sounding decent to your ear prior to hitting the record and look at the level meters to make sure you have them set not too low or too high. Keep the meters around the 0 db mark up or down a db or 2 and you should be ok for now.
Insert in a blank tape into the deck and hit record. A few seconds after that, kick in your drum machine and start playing!
After the bed track is done, you can rewind the tape back to the beginning and un-arm the record function buttons 1.2 & 3 so that you don't record over them by accident!
Now moving to step two of the process called over dubbing, you will add your additional instruments and vocals to what you have already on tape.
To do this you will now use the cue mix section of the portastudio.
On each channel strip you have a tape cue level knob to balance the sound of what's on tape compared to what you will be playing live and adding to the remaining empty tracks. In the monitor section you have the tape cue button to press as well so you can hear the mix of recorded and live sounds to overdub with.
So now, you are playing bass guitar, assigned to buss 4 and arming track 4 on the recorder to get this overdub part of the session down.
The additional instruments are added the same way as the previous method for the bass guitar until the song is fully recorded.
You should also be aware that the 4 recording busses correspond to the 8 tracks of tape in numerical order so buss 1 feeds tracks 1 & 5 of the tape, buss 2 feeds tracks 2 & 6, buss 3 feeds tracks 3 & 7 and buss 4 feeds tracks 4 & 8. As you use it a few times, it will start to make more sense.
Page 7 of the manual actually explains it all quite clearly so please give it a slow and patient read to get all the dirt on that one regarding the tape cue system and successfully hearing what you are doing.
The final third step is mixing down all of your tape tracks onto an external 2 track, stereo recorder which can be a cassette deck, mini disc deck, CD recorder deck, DAT deck or a computer's soundcard line input if you have music recording software installed on your computer.
A stand alone deck will be easier to deal with!
Basically at this point for mixdown, you want to set your mixer channels to receive the sound from each tape track by switching their input to tape and now you will be able to add eq and adjust levels and left to right panning position to taste and assign all those tape channels to 1/2 by pressing the 1/2 button on each strip and hook up your external deck to the 2 track outputs on the portastudio.
Now set your levels on the 2 track by watching it's meters from the playback of your 8 tracks of tape, rewind back to the beginning of the song and hit record on the mastering deck and play on the Portastudio and you will have made a successful stereo master to listen to on your stereo system, car or computer, depending on what format you chose.
I use a CD recorder myself to master with from my 16 track tape recorder.
A lot of detail in this post is missing and for good reason too. Namely because if I was to give every last detail, I would mostly just be re-writing the owners manual and that's not productive for either of us as you said you have the manual already!
So, read the manual at your own pace. If you get stuck on a certain part or passage, read it again and ask questions here too.
The best way to learn though is by actually using the machine, hands on, ears on and that's the best way to absorb all the crap!
Best of luck to you and for the love of god, have fun with it!
It is supposed to be a fun hobby, right?...Right!
Cheers!
