Recording Technique Question

[fiercerealities]

Hello,

I am interested to hear your thoughts and advice on my current recording technique.

I currently have a Yamaha PSR 9000. In the past I have made home demos by plugging directly from my keyboard(previously was PSR 740) to the Aux plugs in back of my home receiver. I have heard some frowns on this method because of a possible mismatch in frequencies between keyboard and amp and unwanted noise, but everything seems to sound great, and the 9000 specifically states where you could plug it into a stereo system. I currently use a Nakamichi BX-100 to record with, using Maxell MS cassettes. I then take that cassette deck and run it to an interface/mixer which plugs into the blue plug on the back of my computer sound card. I then use DAK Wav Editor to record to .WAV files and cleanup.

Now I know what your saying...why go through all that when you could use MIDI, get some software, etc. I don't for a few reasons.. 1)Software can be expensive and I don't like the idea of MIDI revoicing. 2)I really like analog. 3) Either there are a lot of people that don't know how to produce CDs, or the software doesn't do the trick because every CD I have heard that uses Cakewalk or some computer software sounds clean, but has no drive and punch, no dynamics and is really flat.

So my question is...is there anything I need to do to improve the recordings from any stage in the process, even if they are going to be home demos that I will hand to someone and say "here, this isn't the final version but this is the general idea"?

Thanks,
Chris

I'm glad I came across this site.

 

[earworm]

ehm, i've spent years recording my own band on analog cassettes, then i turned to minidisc, i didn't like the hissing on the tapes, and i hated the clipping on the minidisc, i put lots of my cassette recordings on computer and cleaned them up a bit, no bad results for just "home music",
honestly, if you make kick ass songs, then it doesn't matter that you record on cassette or pc, "if the band sucks, the cd will suck too" !!

i think it could be a big improvement if you'd turn to real Tape recorders, with those reels and bigger tapes, not the 1" stuff, but something smaller,
that will sound better than just cassettes i think,

but i think that if you're satisfied with your current quality you should stick to it, maybe mess with a noise reduction unit, i've seen lots of dbx-machines around to get rid of some hissing ,

if you completely want to record on pc, you'll have to start with a decent soundcard, some good cables, maybe a mixing desc or at least a dual-channel (=stereo) preamp,
count the costs,
maybe you're fine with what you're doing now,

my 2 cents