So What Happens Now !!!!

[InstrEd]

33 minutes ago, Craig Anderton said:

Sorry, but it doesn't exceed that threshold until actual name-calling and fistfights break out.

Where did I leave my Brass Knuckles    

Okay back to your regular scheduled program   Bantor 

 

[John Vere]

Ha, I knew a few people would get it. There's uncountable threads there on this topic ( Tape VS DAW)  most are 45 pages long and impossible to glean any solid information.

I like the vintage car analogy someone used in a thread that posed the question " Is Tape Obsolete? "  One answer was-  " nothing is really obsolete if people still use it."  They gave a Classic car as an example.  A 72 Mustang is not exactly obsolete if people still drive them  and it's worth a lot of money just like a 1972 Reel to Reel deck would be  if it's well maintained and in good condition. 

I own a classic 1985 GMC camper van that is in near mint condition . In a campground full of million dollar Mega Motorhomes people always stop by to get a closer look and talk about old cars and trucks. People like old stuff that's in good shape, if it's not then it's simply a old piece of junk.  

 I'm pretty sure if I still had my Fostex r-r 8 track it would not  have been used for a long, long time now. Small studio owners would have never had the resources to purchase a 2" , 1" or even a 1/2" machine. So 1/4" or even Cassette was what you would find in small or bedroom studios before digital came along.  Even brand new they were far from perfect. The only deck I would still use was a Teac half track that took 10"x 1/4" tape that was a wonderful machine. But it was still worth a lot of money when I traded it for a Sony DAT machine.  And I soon was totally digital once I got the Yamaha MD 8.  I still have one.

The quality of my recordings took a huge leap with digital. Consumer digital was 10x the quality of consumer tape based systems. That is still 100% true to this day. I get a huge kick out of these fools who record  DAW recordings back to some old Cassette deck thinking it will somehow magically make their music sound cool.   

I remember the transition to digital was in I guess mid 90's. A group I was in won a battle of the bands and part of the prize was 4 hours in a local semi pro studio. They had just gone to ADAT but the old tape decks were still there behind the console position. The lead guitar player had been in lots of recording studios and when the engineer said OK, rolling, the guitar player said, No where not!  and pointed behind the engineer at the decks which of course were not moving.  The engineer laughed and turned around a started a deck rolling and said, there do you feel better now. The guitar player said it's just not the same without watching those reels roll along when I record. 

[CSistine]

11 hours ago, John Vere said:

 I'm pretty sure if I still had my Fostex r-r 8 track it would not  have been used for a long, long time now. Small studio owners would have never had the resources to purchase a 2" , 1" or even a 1/2" machine. So 1/4" or even Cassette was what you would find in small or bedroom studios before digital came along.

This reminds me of the 80s where I invested all available money in a Tascam 38 recorder (8-track, 1/2"). Today I could never afford it! 😄

12 hours ago, John Vere said:

The guitar player said it's just not the same without watching those reels roll along when I record.

I feel empathy for him! There is some truth in it!

But you are right, the quality of digital is surely much better, especially for small studios!

But I liked recording with tape or digital hardware recorders, because IMO it was/is easier to focus on the music (recording). With computers it's easy to wander off, to get focused on something else! 😄  That's also the reason why I prefer to have no internet on music computers! Also with computer recording I usually make too many takes ('cos it just takes some disk space). This causes a lot of time wasted to choose the right ones! 😆

[Michael Richards]

Back in the early 1980s when I was a working musician my band had 2 Teac 3340s decks. We used one to bounce to the other. We were never good enough to bounce again, so we only really used 6 tracks. I have one of the 3340s and let it sit for 4  years. It no longer works and it seems it will cost a fortune to fix it. I look at it quite a bit and feel very bad I let it get in that condition. I then had a Tascam (?) 8 track cassette. It always sounded thin. Then I had a Sony DAT. It still works fine, but I no longer use it. Don't feel so bad about that.

My band recorded in a New York recording studio with a Studer A827 24 track beast. We thought we were big time. The recordings were not very good. I learned a lesson early on that the person doing the recording is probably going to determine the quality of the recording more than the equipment used. I think that is one of the reasons I have stuck with Cakewalk for 30 years. I feel like I need to explore more than what we have and hope the new Sonar will eventually have some fancy bells and whistles. Yet, I realize I can get better with what I have.

[57Gregy]

My "studio" circa 1979 in my dorm room, Vandenberg AFB, CA.

 

Edited October 16, 2023 by 57Gregy

[Terry Kelley]

20 hours ago, Michael Richards said:

Back in the early 1980s when I was a working musician my band had 2 Teac 3340s decks. We used one to bounce to the other. We were never good enough to bounce again, so we only really used 6 tracks.

...

We used a pair of Dokorder 7140's with modded capstans to run 15ips. Worked great for what they were. We moved to a pair of synced Sansui 6-tracks. Worked ok with noise reduction but was never going to be pro sounding. Tascam T80-8 was nice but really the same as the Dokorder - just on one transport. Eventually switched to ADATs and then multitrack DAW.

I took CbB being free as a gift for the time it's lasted. Can't complain. I do hope Sonar meets my need (function and cost.) If not, there are other options. I am certainly hopefully but I've been fooled before.

Edited October 16, 2023 by Terry Kelley

[MGC59]

Sadly, I am old enough to have started out on a Tascam 4 Track and learned how to mix by bouncing tracks...Then 8 tracks of ADAT synced to Master Tracks Pro Midi to a 32 channel board into a DAT deck. Got great results. But then I get Sonar 9 and all hell starts breaking loose. I have never left Cakewalk since and have never made better recordings than I do now. The biggest difference with my present system is workflow. I can do in a week what used to take me months. Access to plugins and sheer power of the PC make recordings miles beyond anything I used to produce before Cakewalk.

The fact that virtual instruments and effects keep all the sounds in the box also shrunk down the size of my studio to a small desktop space. I no longer have much hardware.

It is a great time to be alive and producing music.

[Michael Richards]

Marco, I enjoy your music, especially your harmonies. You are right, it is a great time to be alive and producing music. Just wish this all would have happened 40 years ago. 

[Shayne White]

I took some audio classes that involved recording onto 24-track tape while I was in college. It was in San Francisco so the professor talked about how the fog that seeped in through the building's air vents would get the tapes damp. The damp tapes would shred if you played them, so you had to bake them in an oven to get them playable. Yeah. Don't complain about your DAW.

[Michael Richards]

That is something else, I have never heard of baking recording tape.

[msmcleod]

30 minutes ago, Michael Richards said:

That is something else, I have never heard of baking recording tape.

It's called Sticky-shed syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky-shed_syndrome

Actually, it doesn't even need to get damp - just natural moisture from the air even in relatively dry climates can cause this over time.

I recently found a bunch of cassettes in my attic with my old 4-track / 8-track recordings from the early 90's.  The TDK SA-X 60 tapes were total garbage, but the Maxell XL-IIS tapes played as if they were new. 

[AB7]

I remember that Mike Oldfield, sometimes called the master of overdub or something like that, did so many overdubs on one reel of tape that he had to toss the whole thing out.  Would not have with Cakewalk!

[Resonant Serpent]

6 hours ago, Michael Richards said:

That is something else, I have never heard of baking recording tape.

https://www.wendycarlos.com/bake a tape/baketape.html

[Danny Miller]

On 10/13/2023 at 8:42 PM, Craig Anderton said:

Free is always nice. But I suspect the new Sonar will be well worth what Cakewalk charges for it.

Just remember...with 2" tape, it cost $200 to record 30 minutes of 24-track music at 15 ips. We're getting off easy

That was in the caveman time, Craig. Time to come back to the future!

[Ron Caird]

On 10/14/2023 at 2:03 PM, Craig Anderton said:

... There were many other workflow differences...punching was more common than comping...

This is interesting.  In my experience, admittedly limited, every Pro Tools operator employs punching  virtually exclusively.  While there are instances where that makes a lot of sense and is more efficient, there are many other times when it eliminates the the possibility of getting a better take or even a better passage than the one where just a small segment is being replaced with a punch.  I have not really driven a Pro Tools system so I don't know how difficult comping is in that workflow, but there are so many applications where comping just seems to be a better approach and I am so used to doing it with Cakewalk.

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

On 10/16/2023 at 6:40 PM, MGC59 said:

Sadly, I am old enough to have started out on a Tascam 4 Track and learned how to mix by bouncing tracks...Then 8 tracks of ADAT synced to Master Tracks Pro Midi to a 32 channel board into a DAT deck. Got great results. But then I get Sonar 9 and all hell starts breaking loose. I have never left Cakewalk since and have never made better recordings than I do now. The biggest difference with my present system is workflow. I can do in a week what used to take me months. Access to plugins and sheer power of the PC make recordings miles beyond anything I used to produce before Cakewalk.

We have trodden very similar paths....

Fostex X28H 4 track synced to Music - X

8 track Black Face ADAT synced to Cakewalk

Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 - I still synced it to the ADAT for the main audio tracks and a few extra tracks recorded into the DAW

A bedroom full of hardware synths, keyboards , reverbs , delays, compressors and other outboard - I even had a patchbay 😀

Then at some point I just sold it all and did everything in the box - so much easier and productive. Now I make 100 tracks a year. 

[Kevin Walsh]

Apropos of a teensy little point, it is not impossible to glean important information from long threads, one need only read them to unlock the wizardly secrets ensconced therein. 

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

17 hours ago, Kevin Walsh said:

Apropos of a teensy little point, it is not impossible to glean important information from long threads, one need only read them to unlock the wizardly secrets ensconced therein. 

Or paste them into Chat GPT and ask it to summarize

 

[jesse g]

I baked my tapes a few times but everytime I did that a CAKE would come out of the oven.   Maybe I was using the wrong recipe for backing, ... Let's see 1 spoon of sugar, 1 spoon of butter, 30 ips tapes...  😂