Pre-DAW Home Studios

Philtre

Lodious said:

I started with a Fostex 280 4 track

I had one of those in the early 90s. Recorded loads on it, drums, guitars, synths, great sound for what it was.

thermionic

Me and musical partner in crime started with hiring a Vestax cassette 4-track from a music shop. £25 or the weekend, came with a crappy dynamic and Boss reverb pedal. We found a Yamaha drum machine going for £50 from a card in a newsagent's window and went halves on that. Only had 4 song memories and took ages to program one in bar by bar, with the display only capable of displaying one drum at a time! My friend later bought a Yamaha 4-track and I got a Tascam 424 Mk II (still got it). The weak link was microphones at that time, even a bog-standard SM57 was expensive... until we discovered the Tandy PZM.

In the late 90s I bought a translucent iMac and got a free copy of a superseded version of Logic free with a magazine - MicroLogic AV. Been upgrading from that ever since!

Fretwired

Bill Nelson, ex-Be Bop Deluxe guitarist had an amazing home studio setup in the 1990s. Here are some PDFs. They are 10Mbytes so be warned if you're on a mobile. A good read though.

http://www.fretwired.com/images/Bill-Nelson-2.pdf

http://www.fretwired.com/images/Bill-Nelson-1.pdf

Philtre

Fretwired said:

Bill Nelson, ex-Be Bop Deluxe guitarist had an amazing home studio setup in the 1990s. Here are some PDFs. They are 10Mbytes so be warned if you're on a mobile. A good read though.

http://www.fretwired.com/images/Bill-Nelson-2.pdf

http://www.fretwired.com/images/Bill-Nelson-1.pdf

Thanks for that, a good read.

I remember Bill posting in his online dairy when he first got a digital mixer (I think it was a Mackie) and complaining that it had a cold sound and needed warming up with analogue gear.

Fretwired

Philtre said:

Thanks for that, a good read.

I remember Bill posting in his online dairy when he first got a digital mixer (I think it was a Mackie) and complaining that it had a cold sound and needed warming up with analogue gear.

Bill's a perfectionist. He replied to me in a post on his forum to say he loved the original Line 6 POD but not the later version when the logo changed. Line 6 had to change the chip and it sounded colder. Only Bill could notice such a difference .. he still uses his old POD bean and a bunch an ancient analogue gear along with an Axe FX.

This is his current small studio in his cottage .. still got the POD .. :-)

Grangousier

What I remember about my first experience with computer recording (midi sequencers and then my first DAW, which was a pirated copy of Cubase) was the period of a few days where I just poke around changing settings, trying to get it to do anything at all, and then suddenly it worked for no reason. Same thing with first getting on the internet. I think technology just wanted to test our commitment in those days. 

thegummy

equalsql said:

In the early 90s I used to have a home studio using a Teac 80-8 half inch reel to reel synced to an Atari 1040ST via SMPTE striped on track 8 running C-Lab Notator mixing with a Studiomaster 24:8:2 mixer. The midi gear was a Kawai K5m multitimbral  synth, a Roland S550 sampler, Roland P330 electric piano module and an Akai midi drum rack. That was a fun system to record on and apart from the Teac I still have all the rest of the gear sequestered around cubby holes in my house.

At one point in the late 80s I even had an Aces 16 track 2 inch reel to reel in the house, but that was insane, it was heavier than a washing machine and the kinetic energy of that bugger on fast rewind was scary.

[edit] Here's them pics.

Only just saw these picswhen looking back to this thread - I really love seeing those. That's a hell of a home studio you had!

thegummy

DiscoStu said:

thegummy said:

Keefy said:

thegummy said:

...

I remember many years ago I saw a documentary about bjork where she was walking along the beach playing with some kind of portable sequencer and found it inspiring. 
...

I believe that would have been a Yamaha QY10 or QY20.

Know what the tv programme was called?

It was the South Bank Show. I had it recorded on VHS back in the day.

Thanks so much for that, this will be great to watch all these years later.

Tex Mexico

My first home studio was a Tascam 488 MkII and a Shure SM58. Eventually I found out how to plug my desktop computer's headphone jack into it to achieve a mono drum track made with a super-basic software sequencer I had on CD-ROM. I used that for a few years until I had my first copy of Cool Edit Pro, which was a software 4-track recorder with rudimentary effects (all destructive, no plugins). After that I used Fruityloops for drums into an expanded Cool Edit Pro which could then go up to 48 tracks and use plugins (if you had enough RAM, which I didn't).

These days I use Reaper, Superior Drummer, Amplitube and any of a hundred other hyper-realistic instrument emulations. I'm glad that I learned on tape and had to make do with basically nothing for years as it taught me approaches I don't think I'd have if I'd come straight to ProTools, but I often wonder what I could have achieved had I had access to those things back then.

Musicwolf

Here is my setup from c1988

Tascam 244 Portastudio, 1 track given up to FSK stripe, copy out to consumer reel to reel, monitoring via hifi amp and speakers and using some old broadcast desk.

If I look at 'Value Today' my old Portastudio (ost £525 in 1984) would have a value today of £1750.

My first 8 track setup cost me between £2k - £2.5k in 1992,  Value today £4,2k - £5.2k

p90fool

What we spent in those days was scary wasn't it? 
My first studio was a Fostex D-80, a Yamaha MD4s and a PC running sequenced drums, which cost me about two grand to get up and running. The current value of those "vintage" recorders is about 50 quid each.

I seemed to spend half my life getting bits of hardware to talk to each other, and the novelty of everything starting up at the same time when you pressed Play (and had booted everything up in the right order) never really wore off. 

I had various bits of outboard in two racks with patchbays, but the only one I still use occasionally is an old Yamaha stereo comp/limiter because it sounds really good. 

Musicwolf

Yes, there was definitely a real sense of achievement when it all worked.  The limited technology enforced creative thinking be it problem solving or mix decisions. With a DAW it is all to easy just to ‘dabble’.  Want to try reversing something? click, click, click. Nah, that’s no good – undo.  With tape you had to take the spools off, work out which track you were now recording to, go for it, spools back off etc.  I can remember recording a track where we wanted to fly a sample in from a movie – except we didn’t have a sampler.  I captured the recording on DAT (remember that), pressed play at what I thought was the right moment and copied it to the 8T, except I was a little to early.  No problem.  Play the sound from the 8T back through an Alesis Quadraverb set as a line delay and tweak the delay time until it was correct – then copy to another track (as the Alesis was probably 50% of my outboard and was needed elsewhere).  Now I just drag and drop.

PhilKing

I started bouncing tracks on an Akai 4000DB reel to reel (I still have one), then moved up to a Dokorder 8140 4-track, using the Akai as a mixdown deck with a Teac MK II mixer,  Then went to a Tascam 244 with a Revox B77 half track.  The next upgrade was to a Tascam 388 8 track with built in mixer.  I had one of the early versions of Cakewalk running on a PC and sync'd it with the Tascam MTS30 at first and then got a rack unit which would generate smpte code from the drum track.  I can't remember what it was called, it was stolen back in 1990 with some other rack gear, when I'd moved back to the States and it was in my parent's house. 

Then I got a Tascam 238 and Soundcraft deck and continued to use that with Cakewalk.  Along the way I've also picked up  Fostex R8 with matching mixer and midi synchronizer.  We recorded some stuff with an ADAT too.  I still have a lot of the analog stuff (238, R8, 244, B77 and 4000DB), but I've been using MOTU 2048's for a long time, first with Sonar and now with either Cubase or Studio One.

I've just had a few of my old tapes digitized and it's interesting to see what I had done back then.  I'm busy bringing it into Studio One to add parts and remix, but the old sound was really nice.  I'm still trying to remember what I put the bass through, as the sound is really punchy!