November 25, 2008 – 11:59 pm
These last couple days, I’ve been talking (both via email and voice) with my best friend Andy. He lives in LA. For those that don’t know, we’ve known each other since 3rd grade and got in to all sorts of hyjinks through out junior and senior high school. We also both got in to making music about the time I pulled a ratty and rusted Teisco ET-220 electric guitar from my parent’s attic. I don’t have that guitar anymore, but I still have the best friend.
We played around with guitars and writing songs and had a band with several different line ups. Once out of high school, it got harder and harder to stay in touch as it always seems to be. Our musical ambitions diverged and that was sort of that. We’ve stayed great friends, even though my musical progression has atrophied. Andy, on the other hand, has been pretty active. He’s been in several bands, DJed at clubs, promoted his own club, and other various musical endeavors. I envy him a bit, but I know I’m the only one holding me back on that stuff. Music is hard hard work. It’s fun and it can be the best time of your life, but it takes dedication, thick skin, and a fair bit of stubbornness. I’ve got plenty of reasons (or excuses if you prefer) for the choices I’ve made (bills to pay, a girlfriend to support, etc), but the biggest roadblock has always been my homebody nature.
But none of that is really what I’m thinking about tonight. I’m not lamenting how much my out of shape musical career imitates my couch potato body. Tonight I’m thinking about that big box of tapes in the closet that represent the body of my musical work. I have something like 30 tapes that contain various musical pieces, complete and incomplete, that need to be transferred to digital. The process is easy enough, but I need a decent cassette deck to play them back in to my PC. And then there are the 4 track masters.
A “4 track” recorder is a tape recorder used for creating songs. Cassette tapes store stereo recordings on both sides of the tape. A standard tape player has a “2 heads” for playback and can play 1 side at a time. A 4 track has “4 heads” for recording and playback and can record or playback both sides at once. Since each side is stereo, this gives you 4 total audio channels per tape, or “4 tracks”. The 4 track recorder allows you to discreetly record 4 separate performances to those 4 tracks. Add in the ability to pan each track left or right, set the playback volume, and adjust the EQ for each track, and you have a mini recording studio. Once you have all the music recorded on the 4 track, you can play it in to a standard tape recorder and “mix down” the whole song to a stereo recording (with all your pan/volume/EQ settings intact). Of course there are ways to squeeze more tracks out of a 4 track and that is were science meets art. A talented four track engineer can make some pretty amazing recordings with one of these decks. I loved mine.
These days you can download a program like Audacity and have 1000 tracks of audio, all crystal clear digital and non destructive, for free. But it’s on you PC and like any other piece of software, its about as reliable as your PC is. You miss alot of the immediacy that comes with a 4 track. Plus a 4 track is a lot easier to operate drunk or intoxicated. With a 4 track you can sit down, plug in, and hit record. You don’t need to wait for boot up or your virus scanner. You don’t get distracted by Digg or have to figure out why your sound card isn’t making any noise. It’s just one REC button away.
Alas, the only 4 track I have at the moment is a Tascam Porta 02 that Erin gave to Corin. It’s missing the power supply and a replacement is $25-$45 on eBay. The funny part is that a Porta 02 with the power supply included is only $9.99! But if I’m going to buy the whole thing, maybe I might want something with a few more features. But man, tapes? Talk about dinosaurs.
I really miss 4 track recording. It was a lot of fun and I always felt productive when I finished mixing down a track.
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