Digital Recorder

[Spruce]

So Bruce, when you mention her using the tape unit what kind of sounds do you have in mind. Kind of a retro thing?

No, they can produce a thick juicy sound that you just can't get with digital...
A recent issue of TapeOp magazine had an article with a whole litany of cool things that you do with cassette 4-tracks....
You really do need a decent pre though...
But you can get some great recordings with those things...

[jmalmsteen]

Yeah...
Dump it into your new H2n...

Wow...I think I have found an area where I need to do a lot more reading. How do you "dump it into the h2n?"
Now, I'm thrilled that you can dump it into the h2 but I just can't imagine how you do that. This is what happens when you go to school and get sucked into another dimension. When I started law school, there were tape based recorders. Then, I graduated and practiced for a few years, decided to take a breath and now there is protools and dumping tascam 424 four tracks into zoom h2s.

[jmalmsteen]

Yes, it's easy. Basically you just plug your tape deck outputs into your computer and convert the file using Audacity (a program which is a free download).

I only bought a digital recorder (DP-008) cause my Tascam cassette 4-track finally died. I like the digital recorder OK but can't honestly say it's an improvement over tape.

Okay, getting closer...how do you plug the tape outs into the computer? Is there some kind of interface?

[foldedpath]

Wow...I think I have found an area where I need to do a lot more reading. How do you "dump it into the h2n?"
Now, I'm thrilled that you can dump it into the h2 but I just can't imagine how you do that. This is what happens when you go to school and get sucked into another dimension. When I started law school, there were tape based recorders. Then, I graduated and practiced for a few years, decided to take a breath and now there is protools and dumping tascam 424 four tracks into zoom h2s.

My $.02... All due respect to Spruce and his recording methods, but I'd advise ignoring any ideas about backpedaling to tape for now. You're fairly new to recording, and need to learn a whole bunch of other stuff about mic placement, gain-staging, and what happens on the back end of this process when you want to crank out an MP3 for online distribution, or a CD as a hardcopy.

Tape is dead. Okay, it's not quite dead, but near enough.

It's something that a few people use these days as a special effect, a sort of compression or saturation. But first you need to know what those two words mean, and "recording on tape" means nothing if you don't have very high-quality microphones and mic preamps feeding that recording medium.

Work on basic recording technique first, with your new H2n. In a few years, you can then worry about whether you need to incorporate analog tape in your signal chain. Me, I couldn't wait to get away from it.

[Spruce]

Tape is dead.

Never.

Wow...I think I have found an area where I need to do a lot more reading. How do you "dump it into the h2n?"

Well, I have an H4n....
I haven't done this (I just got the H4), but I imagine you could take your stereo line outs of your 424, and plumb them into the inserts of the H2...
Then USB the resulting recordings into digital...

OK, looking at the H2 spec sheet, it looks like you've got a 1/8" mini jack input, which is not as ideal as the dual 1/4"'ers in the H4....
But it still could be done....

[jmalmsteen]

Hmm...I will have to see how you go from 1/4 to 1/8, that shouldn't be too much of a process. I bought the 424 and then got so busy with school, I never really used it. I wouldn't mind at least seeing how it sounds. It really is amazing with the new technology though. I think the Tascam was $600 or $700 and now you can get a tascam digital portastudio ten or more years later for $150. At least there is some consolation to Gibson increasing their instrument prices 3x in the same period of time.

Tape does sound good though. One of my friends has a protools based studio and went out of his way to buy a single channel from an old board just to get that warm sound. I don't remember who does this but they take it and put it into a single space rack unit. All this is for is to give the digital technology that analog sound.

[Jim Nollman]

two more cents.

One of my friends has a protools based studio and went out of his way to buy a single channel from an old board just to get that warm sound. I don't remember who does this but they take it and put it into a single space rack unit. All this is for is to give the digital technology that analog sound.

There are lots of different ways to get so-called "warmth" and/or tape saturation into digital recordings. If you explore a bit, you'll find an entire industry selling software mic, tape, and even tube emulators, plus specialized EQs with very accurate "warm" presets, as well as the much more established route of hardware tube microphones and tube preamps that do the job best of all. My own tried and true method, at least right now, is a trusty UA preamp that lets me dial in the amount of tube saturation I prefer.

I suppose the older hardware described in the quote above, will also get you there, although I'd venture that unless you really know your way around wiring and electronic matching, you may risk downgrading the clarity of your overall sound just to add this one rather over-rated feature.

I say over-rated, only because those of us who spend a lot of time recording on digital hardware and software, usually agree that we value the transparency of the d/a-a/d converters, and the accuracy of the preamps over anything that colors a sound.

Speaking about handheld hardware, these units have revolutionized field recording, and the technology just keeps getting better in terms of all-important battery life, and recording capacity. I have owned an M-Audio microtrack for 5 years now, and wore it on a belt loop all day long during a backpack through the Amazon to record birds. I used it with a rather expensive Sennheiser shotgun mic, that i kept in a holster built into my pack, which let me pull it out and turn on the recorder in about 20 seconds. The results were spectacular.

Two weeks ago I tried a new recorder, a Zoom, for recording falling water during a backpack into the Sierra high country. Since i do a lot of editing once back in the studio, I found the Zoom's built-in mics made the Sennheiser unnecessary, and with no lack of clarity.

[J.Albert]

"Just wondering, what quality does everyone record at, I just picked 96k mp3 randomly"

You want higher quality than that.

I'd recommend at least 192k, 256k preferred.

That still saves LOTS of space vs. recording at 44.1khz, 16- or 24-bit.

- John

[Spruce]

There are lots of different ways to get so-called "warmth" and/or tape saturation into digital recordings.

I've been using an old Revox A77 at 15 IPS for mixdown, and it's become my new addiction...
It just glues everything together in a good good way...

I had an interesting conversation with a mastering engineer recently...
Apparently a lot of big name projects are still being delivered via tape...
Probably 1/2" 2-track, but tape nonetheless...

[Jim Nollman]

Spruce, I used to hear the same thing up to about 5 years ago, but not so much now that the software emulators have become so sophisticated and the price point for amazing tube hardware puts it within grasp of shlubs like me. I have happy memories of a CD I did about ten years ago where the producer was exceedingly creative working his screen-based digital setup, his top-of-the-line sampling keyboard, and a big old ADAT machine running 1 inch tape. Talk about walking and chewing gum at the same time, this guy was playing these three systems seamlessly, yet each with its own massive learning curve, while constantly puffing on a &*%#. He not only kept it together, but went on to a grand career producing intricately arranged recordings that blend music and spoken word.

To answer your question, John. In general, try not to record in mp3, since the format doesn't edit very well, and you are losing the "sparkle" on the high end. I am presuming by 96k you are referring to the sample rate of 96k/samples. If so, that's too high for the usual audible recording, and you are also wasting hard drive real estate on sound you can't hear. As a rule of thumb, divide the sample rate in half, and you have the highest frequency that is being recorded. In practical terms, the human ear hears up to about 22 khz. which is why commercial CDs are standardized on a sample rate of 44.1. Most people i know record at 24 bit and 48 k/samples. The slightly higher sample rate makes for better editing, plus the 48 still gets lowered to 44.1 at the end of the mastering phase, using a process called dithering. Look it up online for more info.

[jaycat]

Okay, getting closer...how do you plug the tape outs into the computer? Is there some kind of interface?

You use a radio plug adapter, so you have two tape deck outputs going into one computer input. Like a reverse splitter. You just have to figure out which jack to plug into on your computer. You sacrifice true stereo, if that matters to you. But if you already did some panning on your master, that comes thru.

Today I went back and listened to MP3s of a couple of homemade cuts I made a few years ago on tape. I liked the sound better than what I've been recording lately on the DP-008. But then again, I don't have any of the electronic tape simulation goodies mentioned above.

[foldedpath]

I should mention in my anti-tape diatribe that I do have some history with it. I grew up alongside my Dad's Wollensak 2-track. I've owned Revox 1/4", Fostex high-speed cassette 4-track, all that stuff except for the big studio rigs.

And yep, people still use it. Apparently there's someone here in town building out a new studio space that's all tape-based. It's a big "money is no object" project that isn't aimed at being commercially viable (because what studio is, these days?). It's just someone really into tape, with a lot of money to burn.

A friend in town had a completely tape-based studio until recently. He was a late holdout against digital, until the recording costs just got too high and people didn't want to pay for it on the capture side. He still uses tape or mixdown, although it's now basically a PC-based DAW studio otherwise.

Here are the big drawbacks that keep me from using tape (and of course your mileage may vary on all of this):

• The hardware isn't too expensive if you stick to 1/4", but maintaining the hardware in good shape and good alignment can be very expensive if you hire it out, or a major undertaking if you're going to learn how to do it yourself.
  
• As a capture medium, you're dealing with very high tape costs if you're archiving originals, or avoiding too many passes on re-used tape. You're also dealing with realtime load-in to your DAW for editing. With the number of takes I like to record in a session, it would take a full afternoon for a load-in, compared to just a few minutes for dumping WAV files from a flash card or hard drive.
  
• When acting as producer or engineer and recording someone else, I like to keep things as relaxed as possible. The idea that the recording medium is free and unlimited -- just hard drive or flash card space -- helps musicians stay relaxed. When they're aware that every minute is eating up expensive tape, it changes the whole flavor of the session. It's hard enough to get people to relax in front of a mic, without that added pressure.
  
• When using tape for "glue" or a special effect in mixdown, your results are colored (or not) by the quality of the converters used for that round-trip out of the DAW into the analog world, and then back to digital. That's why I've never gone out of the box, at least not yet, for things like outboard compressors or EQ. I can't afford the kind of converters I'd want for that round-trip. I think it's cool what tape can do, for certain applications (it's killer for drums), but I hate mud and a loss of definition, which can easily occur if you don't get it just right with that round trip. It can also occur when re-using the same tape too many times, and tape isn't getting any cheaper as a recording medium.
  

Right now, I'm throwing most of my money at the front-end -- mics, mic preamps, and the quality of the initial A/D conversion. I'm getting results I'm very happy with, and don't feel that I need any extra sauce on the end product. Another thing is that until recently, about half the stuff I've recorded is for local classical artists, and that's an area where "superclean with just a dash of color" is more appropriate than hammering something with tubes or tape saturation. YMMV, depending on what you're recording.

[jaycat]

. . . Here are the big drawbacks that keep me from using tape . . .

But aren't you glad no one cared about all those drawbacks when they made all the music we all love so much?

[Spruce]

But aren't you glad no one cared about all those drawbacks when they made all the music we all love so much?

Man, take a listen to the first David Grisman Quintet LP...
Razor-Blade City, with tape edits all over the place...
I wore that LP out when it first came out, and never heard a single one...

[jaycat]

Oh yeah. And I seem to remember something called Sgt. Pepper, and then there was Blonde on Blonde. . . . Bill Monroe, Lester Young, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, John Coltrane . . . . . .

[foldedpath]

But aren't you glad no one cared about all those drawbacks when they made all the music we all love so much?

Of course, and there's an argument that the drawbacks in those days were actually positive aspects of the process. When tape and studio time was expensive, you had to have your performance down cold, before walking into a studio. Well unless you were the Beatles, and had the budget to use the studio as one big experimental instrument.

By the way, I just got a copy of "Studio Stories - How the Great New York Records Were Made" by David Simons. Very cool book about that period when some classic recordings were made.

[Spruce]

By the way, I just got a copy of "Studio Stories - How the Great New York Records Were Made" by David Simons. Very cool book about that period when some classic recordings were made.

Thanks for that...
Just ordered one up....

[jaycat]

...Just ordered one up....

+1.

Happy weekend everybody!

[Fran]

For about $100 you can get the little Zoom H1, which does marvels to record in WAV or MP3, has X/Y mics and is really easy to use!

[mandowilli]

Another vote for the Zoom H1. It has a large button on the front, you push it in and it begins recording, you push it again and it stops. Plug it into your computer and you have a folder full of wav or mp3 files. Import them into your mixing program and you are home.
No menus. All settings are on the side of the unit.
Buy the accessory kit to get the case because it is flimsy.

For recording ideas or rehearsals this is the ticket.

[bratsche]

Now that there's a Zoom H2n out, you can find some remarkable deals on the original H2. I could have never afforded one before, but recently got mine for $50 on eBay (unused store display unit, with no box or accessories). I also use it as a computer interface with Audacity. I'm very new at all of this, but it's easy and so much fun! I haven't recorded with anything (other than the video in my digital camera) since my old Walkman clone cassette recorder in the '80s. What a difference!

bratsche

[jmalmsteen]

I'm recording some live bluegrass today so I'm curious to see how the recordings come out on the Zoom H2n.

[Spruce]

A recent issue of TapeOp magazine had an article with a whole litany of cool things that you do with cassette 4-tracks....

Here tis:

Here’s a recent article written for the print edition of Tape Op #81:

Four Tracks and an Attitude

by Luther Russell

As a teenager in 1985 I slaved away all summer as a prep cook to buy a $500 Tascam Porta One 4-track cassette recorder. I proceeded to do what a lot of musicians of my generation did: record like crazy. All I needed to know was that Sgt. Pepper’s… had supposedly been done on a 4-track (though I had no idea which kind) and I was off creating manic bedroom opuses, ones thankfully no one ever heard. But there was an unexpected by-product of this medium: inevitably sounds were created on the Porta One which could never be reproduced in a “real” studio. Were we all crazy, or was there really an intimacy and immediacy being bottled which could never be recaptured? Seeing as cassettes have pretty much died out, and no one uses analog 4-track recorders much anymore, I wanted to list some reasons why we shouldn’t rule them out just yet and why I love my Tascam Portastudio 424 and have kept using it to record certain tracks on albums and singles to this day.

Ten Reasons to Keep Using 4-Track Cassette Recorders:

1. Cassette tape compression. Cassette tapes are 1/8-inch wide. If you stop and think about all the old classic records you love, think about the fact they were all mixed to 1/4-ich tape. We’re talking about Led Zeppelin and The Who – you get the picture. It’s only a hop, skip and a jump to 1/8-inch! I’ve heard a persistent rumor for years that Sticky Fingers was mixed to cassette because it was a novel medium in 1971 and the Stones wanted to squeeze it even harder. Whether it’s true or not, it makes perfect sense when you think of how it sounds. Another great story I heard was that Oh Mercy was mixed to cassette because Bob Dylan was taking home rough cassettes and didn’t understand why the final mixes being pumped out couldn’t sound like what he heard at home.

2. Bouncing is fun. Come on, if you’ve never bounced your drums and bass and a shaker down to one track to make room, you haven’t lived. Whenever you are about to do it you always get that pang of stage-fright thinking that you’ll lose crucial balancing and fidelity, but you’re always happy as hell, with the sound of those three crudely recorded elements squashed together and sounding all washy and fat.

3. Limitations. I’ve recorded a lot of other artists on 4-track, whether for demo-ing purposes, or just for fun. I asked Sarabeth Tucek, some of whose cassette recordings have made it onto albums, why she likes it so much. “I think having less choices helps me get to the essence of the song.” Many artists agree with her, and there is a reason: in this day and age of Pro Tools, plug-ins and programs it gets tougher and tougher to make decisions, therefore working against artistic impulse. Cassettes keep options in check.

4. Some really classic albums have been made on 4-track cassette. Among them are Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, Ween’s The Pod, Elliott Smith’s Roman Candle, Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand and Iron & Wine’s The Creek Drank The Cradle.

5. It’s cheap! You (yes you) can achieve the glorious sounds of extreme acoustic guitar squeaks, popping P’s and tape hiss for a mere $50 on Craigslist. Throw in a few cheap cassettes, some rubbing alcohol, Q-tips and a Shure SM57 and you too can take a sizable chunk out of your life indulging in stoned analog kitchen experimentation. Hell, I found a Porta Studio for $10 at a sidewalk sale the other day.

6. Tricks. Yeah, you heard me, “Tricks.” Wait until you hear what the pitch control on a 424 does. Record a drum beat onto track 1 at top speed then slow it waaay down on playback. Some serious (yet manageable) bottom end, eh? Now flip the cassette over and listen back on track 4 – holy crap, it’s backwards! It sounds like Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced!” If you record on a used cassette, weird, random stuff shows up backwards. Now bounce that to track 2, but really overload it like crazy. It’s really good distortion! Now throw it onto track 3 along with some echo, because The Beatles had to do that in order to utilize multiple effects and so do you.

7. Limiting. As some of us older folks might remember when making mixtapes for our sweethearts back in the day, we had to make the songs appear to be same volume. We were like a whole generation of unwitting mastering engineers. Your editor, Larry Crane, remarked to me while transferring some old tapes recently, ”It reminded me of how the cassette limits the audio really hard but in a cool way.” That’s what I’m talking about. And this happens all the time in 4-track recording, whether you like it or not.

8. Vibe. The original so-called “lo-fi” movement of the’80s and ’90s was really a result of lack of funding, but there’s no denying that it created a mood and atmosphere to some of the music which was missing in a lot of the overly-slick stuff of the time. Anyone remotely acquainted with the field-recording quality and desolate sounds of early 20th-century records cannot deny the spookiness it conjures up when coupled with the right song. Often this essence was stumbled across in some of these lo-fi cassette experiments, such as Michelle Shocked’s The Texas Campfire Tapes or Smog’s Sewn to the Sky.

9. It’s portable. This is what I like the most about the aptly named Porta Studio. I’ve recorded drums in an auditorium, a pipe organ in a church, a grand piano at a friend’s house and vocals in my shower – all on one song!

10. It really can be hi-fi. I have found that some the best sounds I ever got were captured on a 4-track. This was either a result of using some really nice gear or due to plain resourcefulness. Either way you can’t fake a good sound. I used a Neumann through a UA 1176 into a channel on the 4-track recently and it sounded amazing. I’ve used AKG 414s, Shure SM7s and even ribbon mics. Sometimes lo-fi instruments come off very hi-fi on accident. On my first solo record, Lowdown World, (recorded entirely on 4-track cassette) there is a song called “Seven” which was really a demo I recorded immediately after a gig late at night because I didn’t want to forget it. I didn’t have a mic available, so I used a cheap pair of Radio Shack headphones to record the vocal. It was a very dark song done after a very emotional night when a friend almost OD’d backstage. I captured a vocal sound I have never been able to duplicate. When I finished the demo, suddenly a live recording of my band came through the fadeout backwards through effects. Coupled with the only instruments I had lying around, an old Wurlitzer and a Univox drum machine from the ‘70s, I had created a recording that could not be bettered. Mood, emotion, strangeness and an intangible aura that could never have been recorded at Abbey Road.

[jmalmsteen]

Thanks Spruce for the article!
The Zoom H2n worked out great. I was amazed that the auto limit worked and I had no distortion. I have to transfer it to my computer and burn it on to a cd and listen to it as a true test. I was happy I had it to record the Loar I was able to play at IBMA.

[Spruce]

Nice!