Tascam 1" 4 tracks

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Jillchaw

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Can anyone post any pics of the Tascam 1" 4 tracks? Its harder than shit to find them for sale or even find pictures of them. I saw one a long time ago on ebay, and I really wanted it but so did everybody else.
 
cjacek said:
TASCAM never made a 1" 4 track.
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They did make 1/2" 4-tracks, though. There was a version of the ATR in this format IIRC.
 
jpmorris said:
They did make 1/2" 4-tracks, though. There was a version of the ATR in this format IIRC.
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Yeah, that'd be cool to have but these pop up very infrequently on the used market :(
 
The Beatles used a 4 track 1", didn't they ? What was the machine called ? :confused:
 
cjacek said:
The Beatles used a 4 track 1", didn't they ? What was the machine called ? :confused:
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Everyone has a different answer to that. I always heard it was a Studer C37 or J37, but I think it was probably an EMI unit, probably a BTR recorder of some kind.
 
The Beatles Sesssions book is a great historical read for engineers. Session notes, equipment, numbers of takes, track sheets...for every single session the Beatles ever did anywhere. Martin's book is good as well.

In 1961-62, Martin had been trying to talk EMI into buying a bunch of 3m 1" 3-tracks as used here in all the LA studios such as Capitol. EMI kept stalling him off and finally, when they did update the existing old 2-tracks, EMI decided to go with a hybrid, company-built set of 1" 4-tracks. Which was easy for EMI because they built so much of their own stuff anyway.

As soon as the bunch of 4-tracks arrived, Martin planted two of them in the control room of Abbey 2.

The procedure for the next 5 or so years was this...fill 4 tracks of machine 1..submix to 2 tracks of machine 2..add 2 tracks..submix back to 2 tracks of machine 1. etc etc. Which is how it comes to be that there are hundreds of reels of 1" Beatle tapes in the EMI vault.

When all those tapes and 1" machines were hauled out of storage and the "non" submixed tape tracks were transferred to Protools a few years back and remixed, one finds that early-mid-late Beatle recordings are actually 30+ tracks of individual things. Not the popular folklore that the Beatles did everything on the confines of four tracks and four tracks alone. Not true...They didn't even do that in 61-62 when they were recording in stereo..even then, the setup was to ping-pong and submix between two stereo machines.

As far as the twin four-track years..."Penny Lane" alone is a 36-38 track song...and sounds so incredibly beautiful on the new stereo/surround remix on the dvd anthology. Gone are all the limitations imposed by those original 2 4-track machines.

The Sessions book is great also because it shows how incredibly frustrating it was for all the guys involved in the sessions to be working with the limits of the tape...sessions literally had to simply stop whenever it was time to do a submix ("reduction mix").
 
yea yea yea

i meant 1/2 inch 4 track. I think i messed up because i was thinking that it would be DOUBLE the track with of my current recorder, but it would actually only be so due to half the tracks. Sorry about the slip. No pictures from anyone? no atr-60/4 pics?
 
Jillchaw said:
i meant 1/2 inch 4 track. I think i messed up because i was thinking that it would be DOUBLE the track with of my current recorder, but it would actually only be so due to half the tracks. Sorry about the slip. No pictures from anyone? no atr-60/4 pics?
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No unfortunately, but the last one I saw didn't look vastly different from this:

http://staffwww.itn.liu.se/~nikro/synth/

..which is the 8-track version. Just fewer meters :)
 
which one

of the old tascam 1/2 inch 4 tracks was red? I could have swore the one i saw on ebay a few months back was red or partially red. That "spanish" mixer looks cool as shit....
 
Jillchaw said:
of the old tascam 1/2 inch 4 tracks was red? I could have swore the one i saw on ebay a few months back was red or partially red. That "spanish" mixer looks cool as shit....
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I think they were part of the 70 series of Tascams. They looked like this (kinda). I had posted one from ebay here about a year ago but that picture is long gone.

I would have like the one above too. It went for cheap but its about a 5 hour drive to the top of Vt for me.
 
Why does all the neat stuff have to be 1200 miles or more away from me?
Plus its not cheap. :rolleyes:
 
Herm said:
Why does all the neat stuff have to be 1200 miles or more away from me?
Plus its not cheap. :rolleyes:
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I agree about the prices on the gear being on the higher side of what one would see on ebay but, keep in mind these decks are being sold by a professional sales and repair facility that can actually fix and maintain the gear for you after the sale and even make house calls on the larger items.

If we take the ebay mental conditioning out of the picture, those prices wouldn't feel so bad.

Cheers! :)
 
The 70 series is *very* warm sounding, although the interface as a whole is a bit clunky and calibration of the deck is almost impossible without the extender card. And the NAB hubs were custom and basically sucked. About 2 years back I had a 70-4 and a 70-8 1/2 deck. I thought the 70-4 was pretty fat and fluffy sounding. Shoulda kept it...
 
In case anyone's interested, I've just spotted this:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/STUDER-J37-ON...397019489QQcategoryZ23785QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

It is a Studer J37, a true 1" 4-track (even though it's not really what this thread was supposed to be about).

The auction also has this link, about when their machine first arrived:
http://www.sirensound.com/pages/8/index.htm

And yes, there is that ever-present line about it being the kind of machine the Beatles used..

I love this line from the Q&A:

I have no intention of ending [the auction] early, it may be withdrawn though if I can't handle the emotional departure
 
OMG!! 4 track 1" !!!!!!! :eek:

Me wants one!!!!!!!!!! :D Seriously!! :eek:
 
jpmorris said:
I love this line from the Q&A:

I have no intention of ending [the auction] early, it may be withdrawn though if I can't handle the emotional departure
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Me too ... as I can relate .. :o
 
jpmorris said:
And yes, there is that ever-present line about it being the kind of machine the Beatles used..
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But this time it's pretty accurate. ;)
 
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