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The Great AAD experiment...


masterbuilt

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I decided that I'd love to recapture the warmth of recordings I did in studios in the 1970s through the early 1990s, so, I checked around and now have two Tascam 4-tracks (one 414MkII and one BRAND NEW 424). I decided to record another rendition of my song "Typical Day" on one of the analog units and mix it through an analog port onto the digital recorder (Zoom MRS-8).

 

The mix sounded great on the Tascam and dumping it to the MRS-8 has a caveat... the recording ended up distorted a little via the stereo input, so, I ran the input through tracks one and two. This lost the panning on the Tascam (but it still sounded nice and warm with great clarity. Tomorrow I plan to record the bass guitar and the percussion directly into the digital recorder.

 

This might be the best of both worlds... digital for drums or percussion and for the MIX, but analog warmth for the acoustic guitar and vocal tracks.

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I had a partly digital, partly analog setup. I had a board I really loved, a great sounding Allen and Heath board. I know people were a little critical of my running out of a digital recorder into the analog board and into a computer because of the extra analog>digital conversion; but I always thought the board made it sound great, so I didn't care about the extra A-D.

 

If it sounds good to you, do what works. Look forward to hearing it!

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I dunno; perhaps if I had a nice 1" or 2" 24 track tape machine I'd feel the same way, but I did a lot of recording on a Tascam 424, and I much prefer the sound coming from my digital recordings than I do from the Tascam. For one thing, there was always a lot of overdubs, and a couple of generations of tape, which always degraded the sound quality. I've imported and remixed one of my last 424 recording sessions, and it sounds way better than the original mixes, due to A) I know a lot more about mixing now than I did 16 years ago B) one less generation of tape C) the availability of decent compression algorithms and D) other factors I can't think of at the moment. There are issues in the digital domain that need to be taken into account (like summing, which is one reason why people send things out to an analog mixer). Whatever makes you happy, though. Even if I had a high end tape machine, I'd still have rewind and fastforward over and over; I like the ability to press a button and be instantly where I need to be in a song. Digital is certainly less forgiving of bad technique, either in the playing/arrangement or engineering departments, that is for sure.

 

My two Pfennigs,

 

Glenn

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Glenn... all good points. I'd love to find a good conditioned one-inch tape machine, but those were played into the ground before the switch to digital. I was actually a digital early adopter, but, always wished for better warmth and tried just about every filter I could, never really found what I wanted in the vocals. I did find guitars sounded pretty good. Compression was always colder than it should have been, too.

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For acoustic-based recordings, it's hard to beat analog's warmth...currently negotiating for a tube mixing board, from the 60s, to add to my home studio.

 

 

Mastering engineers are still using those. I hope you get it and love your results.

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I used this board on part of my current CD, so I know I'll love it...right now it's just a question of working out a
fair
price for it.
:cool:



Terry, I hope you get a great price, then, and I look forward to hearing a sample of the results.

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