What did you record on the mighty Tascam 246?

Caffeine_Vampire

Back in that day.

goldtop

Was the 244 for me, and it was mostly maudlin prog-rock. Probably best that those tapes are long gone!  

Caffeine_Vampire

goldtop said:

Was the 244 for me, and it was mostly maudlin prog-rock. Probably best that those tapes are long gone!  

Nonsense! Dig 'em out.

blobb

414 for me + Zoom Rhythmtrack 234 (which I though was fantastic). I would bounce the 4 tracks to a mini disc recorder so I have boxes and boxes (literally) of portastudio snippets, including a load of dictaphone tapes and a pile of mini discs.

thermionic

Yamaha MT100 or MT120 followed by a 424 Mk II for me, and it was shambling jangly indiepop. Been doing a lot of work on the old tapes recently as someone wants to release an album on bandcamp and cd!

Cryptid

Ah those were the days. Drums from an Akai S900 with SCSI hard drive, triggered by an Atari ST running Notator Logic.
Thrash, metal and punk rock mainly. A whole lot of bouncing down, I loved it. All that tape compression gluing things together. Fast decisions there was no coming back from. Bliss. 

DiscoStu

Yamaha MT120. It's still around, somewhere.
Mostly thrash and grunge but a lot of clean stuff too. I used to do drums and bass line in Octamed on my dad's Amiga, then add two guitar tracks and a vocal. I never really did the bouncing thing, I had 4 tracks so that's what I used. Bloody brilliant times and probably the most musically creative of my life.
I have a box full of 'jamz' tapes which were basically me pressing record, drinking beer, playing shite and hoping that there would be some ideas come out along the way.
It worked a few times and I'd then try to expand those ideas as 4-tracks.
I've got a couple of those somewhere too.

It's all too easy these days!

slacker

My old band slacker and no you are not hearing them.

BillDL

Oh my!  I just looked up Tascam model numbers to refresh my memory of what one i owned, and I see that the 244 portastudios are being advertised for over 500 quid now, presumably because they are "vintage" and "made in Japan".  I'm sure somebody posted here a few days ago that Tascam were reintroducing the cassette tapes again, presumably for the enthusiasts.

I never really got around to doing a whole lot with mine over the space of three or so years other than create about a dozen of my own guitar instrumentals using all kinds of improvised instruments for backing, including strings and "bass" with a small Casiotone organ, and drums with a Boss DR 550.  I bought my Portastudio in my late 20s but it was shelved a lot of the time due to long working hours and my now ex moving in with me and cramping my pastimes..  I ended up selling it to one of the guys from a Glasgow based band from the mid 80s named The River Detectives who were getting a band together again and wanted to make demos.

I still have some cassettes somewhere up in my loft that I mixed down from the portastudio.  I must try and find them when I have time and see now whether they were actually any good.

Caffeine_Vampire

BillDL said:

Oh my!  I just looked up Tascam model numbers to refresh my memory of what one i owned, and I see that the 244 portastudios are being advertised for over 500 quid now, presumably because they are "vintage" and "made in Japan".  I'm sure somebody posted here a few days ago that Tascam were reintroducing the cassette tapes again, presumably for the enthusiasts.

I never really got around to doing a whole lot with mine over the space of three or so years other than create about a dozen of my own guitar instrumentals using all kinds of improvised instruments for backing, including strings and "bass" with a small Casiotone organ, and drums with a Boss DR 550.  I bought my Portastudio in my late 20s but it was shelved a lot of the time due to long working hours and my now ex moving in with me and cramping my pastimes..  I ended up selling it to one of the guys from a Glasgow based band from the mid 80s named The River Detectives who were getting a band together again and wanted to make demos.

I still have some cassettes somewhere up in my loft that I mixed down from the portastudio.  I must try and find them when I have time and see now whether they were actually any good.

And also still pretty damn good

mudslide73

I borrowed a Fostex X-15 which had only two inputs but that's all I needed. I didn't have the facility to program drums so just used loops from cds. I didn't really record anything I'd share but had a lot of fun. I think one of the reasons I took to DAWS so quickly was because of that machine. It's weird when you go through tapes now and side B is all backwards

PhilKing

I had a 244 for many years and then upgraded to a 388 (8 track, reel to reel).   This was just as computer software was starting and I had the Tascam Midi Synchronizer and a DX7 and RX11 drum machine, with Cakewalk on a PC, mixing down onto a Revox B-77 (which I still have).   I managed to get my 8-track tapes converted to digital and am about to look at working with them in Cubase.  After I moved back to the States, I picked up a Tascam 238 (8-track cassette).  I also have I still have a Tascam 424 cassette deck, which I have been using to move old tapes to Cubase.   I also have a Fostex R8, with the synchronizer and matching mixer, which I never really used properly, due to buying it just before I moved back to the States (though strangely it is a US voltage set).

Stratavarious

Loved my Fostex X15 and Yamaha QY70 and RX21 back in the day…. Variations of hair rock and VH solo attempts and any tracks my duo covered.  Then I got a Yamaha CS5 music computer - an MSX with a DX synth in it and a minidisc on route to digital and the amazing QY700 sequencer (on sale here)

I actually found some tape demos I made back then to drum up golf club gigs and the like.  There is a lot of jazz and standards I have forgotten over the years.

thermionic

Another thing I remember is that we had crappy hi-fi systems so we “mastered” an ep and a single by buying beers for some friends who had decent hifi systems with a seperate cassette deck. I left the single to my friend to do because I was away and he decided that the tracks we’d recorded with dbx noise reduction on sounded better with it off!

Here’s a photo of my first proper setup (as opposed to the 4-track on the living room floor, plugged into whatever crap stereo system I had at the time.)

https://i.imgur.com/ssCcpiA.jpg

Bought a pair of JPW Mini Monitors and an ex-demo Ariston amp from Richer sounds. Alesis SR-16 drum machine is present, but obviously before I got a Microverb and 3630 Compressor.

DiscoStu

Right, daft question time.
Are all 4-tracks equal? As in, if you record on one type of machine (e.g. Yamaha) will it work on another (e.g. Tascam) or will the tracks not line up properly? 

thermionic

I've just reworked a load of 4-track masters for an album we have coming out. Originally recorded on a Yamaha MT120 or something. I had some earlier stuff recorded on a Vestafire MR100 Pro - that stuff is not on the album but I did make some personal copies. I did all this with my Tascam 424 MkII, just taking the tape outs into Logic. No problems and it sounds great. Luckily both earlier machines had dbx noise reduction, as does the Tascam - it would have been a different story if one of them used Dolby...

Of course they line up as they are just the same 4 tracks as standard cassette deck uses. Maybe I could have adjusted the azimuth of the heads on the Tascam to see if I got a stronger signal (matching the head alignment of the machine they were recoprded on), but I didn't bother. I just gave the heads a clean.

DiscoStu

Cool. I can't find my MT120 and have been thinking about my old tapes since this thread surfaced so I might buy a machine to go through them.

Caffeine_Vampire

I'm just about to record on my 246 again.

AsterixTG

The 414 for me.

Did some great stuff on it really - many of the riffs and parts that ended up on fully recorded tracks would have been initially put to tape on it - it was also used to record every rehearsal & writing session, which would have been a lot as when we started out we had a lock in deal at Playground in Camden - set up everything on a Monday morning and the room was ours until Friday afternoon - go in whenever and try and get better/write stuff. Did that for nigh on 6 months - needless to say, we recorded a lot of crap with a rare nugget of gold.

Supportact

I got a tascam porta 07 in the 90s. Still working, I still use it from time to time. I've recorded all sorts on it from band practices to weird ambient noises. I love the way it forces you to commit to sounds and parts while recording.

monquixote

I definitely find that computers are a totally creativity free zone for me. Fine for recording finished stuff but no good for writing.

Limited hardware is so much more fun.