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Hi friends. I posted this on the TapeOp Message Board for some advice and just copy/pasted over here. I hope you don't mind... it's just that it was my first post on their forum, and my like 960th on this one, so I figured I could just throw this out to you.

I'll try to make this detailed and quick. I got started with recording on a Tascam Porta 02 in my closet ("studio") in 1999. Moved onto a Boss BR-8 in 2005. Now using Logic Pro Studio 9 on my Macbook Pro. Long story short: Not having fun.

I was re-reading my TapeOp Book from about a decade ago and got super-inspired to record my fuzzpop power trio on a Tascam 4-track, preferably a 424 mkII or mkIII once I get a hold of one (PLEASE answer your Craigslist replies, jerks.).

Anyway, I was wondering about pretty basic drum recording techniques with a cassette 4-track. I want a 424 mkII or mkIII so I can record four tracks simultaneously using the Glyn Johns method (the method I use with Logic anyway). However, I'm super keen on not doing a whole lot of processing/producing of the tracks post-recording. Yes, I'm going to cheat and mixdown to Logic and perhaps do some VERY MINIMAL editing, but not a lot.

THUS: I'm wondering about recording 4-tracks of simultaneous drums to the 424 mkII/III and what you might recommend for like a preamp or compression... or whether I should just not bother with those for the most part, record direct, and then do a little bit of all that while mixing.

I have a Presonus Bluetube Preamp which can handle two signals, and can borrow an Art Tube Preamp from a friend. But what about compression? For my case, would that typically be done with a four-channel (or more) compressor? Or should I not ever really bother with that?

Drums and preamp/compression is pretty much the only thing I'm having trouble understanding, otherwise vocals, guitars, and bass aren't so complicated."

So like yeah. Any of you guys still do any "mid-fi" recording with your 4-tracks, or have any experience recording 4-tracks of simultaneous drums, and, if so, what kind of outboard equipment / techniques might you recommend?


THONKS,

C

For that type of project, and I won't try to dissuade you of the folly of nostalgia for cassette multitrackers, I'd step up and get a 488, no questions asked. Mk Is are still very cheap.

You'll get moderately better fidelity, can still record on 4 simultaneous tracks (and have more if you need for overdubs or if you feel like being the other analog track king), and not pay much more than other than shipping, since they're beasts of units.

If what you want is somehow retro like that, get your basic SM57/58s and equivalents and go to town. Record as hot as you dare, experiment with the NR on/off (and all possible combos, sometimes it helped for vibe to swap DBX on/off when it came time to mix even if it hadn't been used, etc).

You're going to get boatloads and boatloads of compression and limited dynamic range just using cassette tape and the onboard mixer, the true multitrack experience used a preamp at most for phantom power or for the units that only had mic pres on inputs 1 and 2.

I'd also consider some not perfect room micing as well to be able to blend in the terrible-fi feel should you want to.

Don't forget to count in songs with 'shit, two, three, four' for ambience.

The best drums I got out of cassette multitrackers were usually in very nice rooms with distance micing. Too much boominess in a lot of the cheaper Tascam units when being hit with hot percussion.

Yes, I said being hit with hot percussion. Queue bad .gifs.

Enjoy the now insane price of good tape. ;0

Thank you, friend. I'm sorry we quarrelled a few months back.

The 488, hmm? I always thought the fidelity on 8-track cassette recorders was lower than 4-tracks... perhaps I'm confused about how they work. I thought that a 4-track basically splits the tape into 4 units, while the 8-track splits it into 8... thus you would have a wider area to print with a 4-track, and half as much on an 8-track. I guess I don't understand.

I've read on a few other forums that there is compression enough on hot tape recording that you don't really need to worry about a dedicated "compressor" unit. That's good. I think the 488 has 4 preamps, and I have a standalone that I can use as well. Only two XLR inputs on the 488, though.

Still interested in a straight 4-track though, but maybe only for the reasons I outlined in the first paragraph, which may be untrue! Let me know.


Thonks again,

C

The 488, hmm? I always thought the fidelity on 8-track cassette recorders was lower than 4-tracks... perhaps I'm confused about how they work. I thought that a 4-track basically splits the tape into 4 units, while the 8-track splits it into 8... thus you would have a wider area to print with a 4-track, and half as much on an 8-track. I guess I don't understand.

You're splitting the tracks, yes, but with radically better heads and transport mechanisms, also you're going at double speed minimum full-time. I wasn't going to to redline for blowout fuzz in the unit when I used mine; I wasn't on the 414 or 424 either. 488 approaches tolerable in fidelity but I used best practices across the board: XLII fulltime, regular cleaning, did not reuse tape, and didn't try to record "Bohemian Rhapsody" until the tape was clear.

I think the 488 has 4 preamps, and I have a standalone that I can use as well. Only two XLR inputs on the 488, though.

Mk2 has 2 XLRs, 488 no mark has 2 preamps but no XLR. I used a no-mark and either the XLR to 1/4" impedance matching plugs (think they were $12 or 15 @ at Radio Shack etc) or a row of the ART Tube MPs when they were the cheapest functional game in town at a whopping $119@. God, I feel old and cheap.

The XLR input situation is similar on the 414s and 424s, and the non-terrible Porta 02s (the first of the bunch to be field-recording capable on a pile of C or D cells, I traded mine for a Bassman straight across) - some have them, some don't, and you learned to adapt back in the day to what it had. Unless you needed phantom power or a pre on a channel that didn't have it, the XLR/1/4" transformers worked fine.

As far as your 'not fun' scenario with Logic, maybe you just hate the interface. For PC (since I'm not a Mac guy, never have been), I went with DAWs that were reminiscent of tape as much as possible - early on in '96 or so I was using the ancient N-track, which didn't have much in the way of features but was low-overhead and pretended to be a tape machine in a lot of ways. These days I'm using the venerable and outdated Mackie Tracktion; it runs like a beaten horse on modern hardware and I'm recoridng music instantly.

Also, are you using the mouse/key solution to editing/mixing etc in Logic? I know that it just doesn't feel the same to not have a big board in front of me that I can swear at - maybe if we had a better idea of what you don't like about your current recording setup people might have suggestions for alternatives.

If it's simplicity of the basic 4 track, the current cheapie Tascam digitals aren't bad, you have better fidelity than the cassette ever did, and a lot of the 'press record and go' mentality' back.

I hate to get all philosophical on how and why you do things as much as the next guy, but unless it's pure nostalgia of "I liked to do it this way", any technique from the old Tape Op era is still generally applicable today. I cut my teeth on it too, recording and mixing friend's bands before I ever picked up an instrument. I was the garage band metal recording king. Don't tell the neighbors, it's embarassing.

What do you not like about the digital recording? is it the sound or the interface? I enjoy logic but I still use my Tascam tsr 8 for drums just because slamming drums into tape sounds so Awesome. I dont use any kind of compressor before tape. IMO its not needed as the tape gives me all the compression I need. I dont know anything about the MK's but Im sure you could find it all online.

Hello again, dudes. Sorry for the slightly delayed response... I think we have a good discussion going.

Regarding digital recording... for the most part, I think it's great. I blows my mind that, after years of 4-track and Boss BR-8 recording, you can SEE what you're recording, and then chop it all up and edit it like it was Mario Paint (I always use that analogy... that kinda what I experience). My "problem" with digital recording... and not even digital recording, but specifically COMPUTER recording... is that I don't really feel like much of a skilled musician. And yep, it does get moderately philosophical, if you could call it that, or sociological... I just don't want to record sitting in the same spot where I jagoff (yep, the first item that came to mind), write e-mails, watch YouTube, play Flash video games, and generally distract myself from things that I actually really enjoy doing.

Plus... there's just too much. I'm very interested in home recording, and recording in general, and have been since 8th grade (1994), and I can get some really good results with Logic and my MacBook Pro. Better than I thought I could ever do. But the process of GETTING those good recordings isn't very fun for me. Sure, I could practice my balls off for a part, and then sit down and record it well... it's just a matter of musical discipline. But then there is always the option of 80 takes, an hour worth of cutting and pasting, syncing, plug-in production, etc. I don't even really know how to use EQ or compression... I just fiddle with the pre-made plug-ins and it gets to be pretty good. It's an unprecedented way to create music... but you just click on shit like you do with anything else.

With cassette tape 4-tracks, etc. (perhaps even reel-to-reel at some point, though not likely), there isn't nothing else like it. You put in a tape, you twist and turn knobs, you get your standalone compressors and EQs and effects and everything ready, and you record a complete performance. You HEAR what you're doing without the aid of seeing what you're doing, which I think is basically really weird (the seeing part), and is more like Mario Paint, a video game, to me than creating music.

Off subject, but it's the same reason I want to get a typewriter. Instead of writing the story that I've been working on in the same place that I jagoff, write e-mails, watch YouTube, etc., I want to perform the unique act of WRITING A STORY (sans "writing)... ok... CREATING a story with an instrument (the typewriter) in a specific, special mindset, with, and this is the best part, a TANGIBLE CREATION (i.e. the stack of typed-upon paper) as the result.

Lest I become like David Cross's character in this sketch, I feel that these are all beneficial things that I can do for myself as an artist and human being. And again... for myself.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCumH8LRo1A[/youtube]

With all that in mind, can anyone recommend a desktop compressor that has two separate mono channels?

C

As far as decent outboard compression, not going to be of much help, it's the one thing I'm a plugin guy for if needed - the decent plugin compressors smoke, absolutely smoke the low-end prosumer rack compressors. That said, starting with a cheapie isn't going to hurt I suppose, especially if you're used to older prosumer analog Tascam stuff. (I end up covering this more below and am too lazy to rewrite this to address that. ;0 )

That said, this all sounds like a headspace issue, and not even sure that going all analog, all outboard will fix that. You *can* learn to use the plugins just like you use an outboard unit. You can limit yourself to a certain amount of editing, or treat digital like tape in a take it or leave it philosophy. As an aside, to limit my own stupid "Axl Rose in the studio for 18 years" stupidity, I've treated studio time like a live performance for a long time - I don't punch in, I don't cut and paste. Either the track works (and what I've added) works, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, I throw it out and start over, period.

Consider doing something to change the work environment when you're recording. Meditate. Different lighting, candles, dancing strippers, something that makes it unlike when you're just randomly surfing around. Given the 'don't like to be doing the same thing I'm doing the rest of the time', I'd also wager that a USB mixer, maybe even one of the fancy ones with automated motorized faders and crap, might be the solution to your problem - get you away from the PC as a PC and instead back to a mixing desk type environment.

You mention not being able to "use" EQ or compression; ironically, the two are radically easier to actually learn what you're doing with a visual display of the waveform. I jerked and tweaked stuff intuitively a *lot* more in ten years+ of analog recordings without understanding exactly what it was I was doing - looking at the waveform or an analysis of frequency ranges tells you where the spikes are, exactly, and lets you drive right into where the problems can be. Other than ridiculously expensive studio gear I had no hope of owning in my home recording slumming days, it was an all by ear proposition. Now, I know what that 200hz boost or cut sounds like intuitively, because I've been able to see exactly what boosting 15 db does. Hell, I can increment that boost in tiny, repeatable fractions as opposed to praying that I have enough fingers for the board movements I need to do at the time. I don't miss trying to explain to roommates and lovers that I need them to move this slider to here when I nod.

That said, in effect, even with the outboard gear, you're going to end up using 'presets' - you know that a three particular settings on your outboard compressor sound good with drums, and you'll start with that sound. I have rack units that I use daily with dials that have not had the parameters adjusted in literally years until I take it apart for cleaning/dust removal or to rewire the bay grudgingly.

Basically everything I know about mixing and recording I learned on analog boxes, and it all transferred over to digital except the maintenance/cleaning/tape splicing, and I don't miss any of that.

The fundamental difference is you're coming at this from the other end of the bell curve vs what was available for those of us wrecking our lives with home recording in the 80s and early 90s; you have near limitless options and choices and gear (virtual or otherwise). You can't go home again unknowing what you know with the availability, fidelity, etc of the digital stuff - a few days or weeks after going intentionally retro, you stand to have the opposite reaction as an amazing take or approach is ruined because you used old, nasty gear when you didn't have to.

I don't mean to come down hard on the 'it's in your head, deal' point, but that is to a large degree what this is. Make your recording workspace unilke your day to day stuff. Get yourself a second computer if you have to to make it happen, one that you only use to record. If you want lo-fi and old-school home recording compression, buy an 80s or early 90s 'vintage' rack unit that's not a Neve or UA etc primo unit - think Peavey, Rane, store brand stuff that you wouldn't have been caught dead with in Tape Op. In other words, the stuff that people were actually using vs what was being dreamed about. You were still limited by the end fidelity of whatever deck you were using for recording, and for most of us, that was a Tascam something or other, with dreams of a 8 track 1/2" reel. ;0 For perspective, quality or intellectual property issues aside, today's Behringer rack compressors will *smoke* the bottom-tier stuff of that era. Absolutely destroy.

That said, I pulled out a raw wav from my last batch of 4 and 8 track tapes, making sure I took something that originated from a period in which I could afford halfway acceptable mics and was using one of the later Tascam units (post-halfway OK DBX) - to get some of the sound you're looking for, it's not just compression, it's frequency rolloff. The cut after 5k is a slope to hell - it's barely signal at all after 10k even on Moog arpegiations in the shriek register, acoustic instruments, and brass percussion. Some of that's tape aging, perhaps - but it wasn't any better when I was younger.