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I had one of those in the early 90s. Recorded loads on it, drums, guitars, synths, great sound for what it was.
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In the late 90s I bought a translucent iMac and got a free copy of a superseded version of Logic free with a magazine - MicroLogic AV.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!
http://www.fretwired.com/images/Bill-Nelson-1.pdf
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
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.
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.
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.
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!