Having gotten some good advice from this group before, let me toss this
question out. I'm a singer/writer with basic engineering skills, which seem
to be enough for me to master my own stuff for CD.
That's my basic profile. And I've already got the wall to wall
recording studio that extends across my entire room. But, the sheer mental
WEIGHT of having to set everything up does seem to interfere with the
creative process. As a matter of course, I find that if I do my entire
technical setup the night before I want to work on some music, then all I
have to do is turn on the stuff the next morning and get to work without
doing a lot of pre-production stuff that detracts from letting the muses do
their number. I like to relax while I work, and over the years I have found
that it's harder to do because the technology has gotten so complex. I miss
the old mono tape recorder where I just had to push record, and GO. Stereo
was a step up, but as Chet Atkins once said when Ampex issued the first 3
track, "What the hell are we going to do with the third track?
This past week I was reviewing a bunch of old performances I did on my
little 200 dollar Sony two channel minidisc recorder, and I found the
performances to be more relaxed in general, and therefore, probably more
listener friendly. I had anticipated at the time I did the original
recordings that I might want to use the performances for release at a later
date so I set it up this way:
Left Channel was for voice
Right Channel was for drum machine and basic rhythm guitar.
I transfer the good performances over to the PC, and then re-record my
guitar onto a new channel on the PC (Cakewalk pro 9), , and bring in a real
drummer to play real drums, using my original minidisc right channel as his
reference track for the timing.
I would PREFER to set up a 4 channel minidisc recorder, or SOME kind of
machine with at least the same quality or better than a minidisc recorder,
like this.
channel 1 for vocal
channel 2 for guitar
channel 3 for stripe (Fsk or SMPTE)
channel 4 for drum machine
Then at least I won't have to retrack my guitar, as well as leaving open
other possibilities for later.
I have been researching this for the past week, and I see that TASCAM has a
minidisc 4 track recorder workstation (although it's really 12 channels,
they say- which confuses me. Why call it a 4, if it's a 12?), but the price
is around 1200 dollars. That's too much. I just want to spend 200 to 500
dollars for a basic recorder setup that won't hinder me with too many bells
and whistles. Likewise, I see little pocket sized multitrack workstations
that have a lot of features from Boss, Roland, and others for around 300 to
500 dollars or so, but I'm not sure if they provide digital outs for Wav
files. One of these machines allows the user to send out MP3 files to the
PC, but I don't think the quality would be up to what I can get out of my
simple minidisc recorder. I know Pro engineers don't like the compression on
minidisc recorders, but I find them to be more than suitable for my simple
rock and roll songs, which I usually process the hell out of anyways. (We
ain't talking Opera here fellas.) Personally, I can't tell the difference
between a final mix from my PC over to a CD, which I also mix to minidisc at
the same time. The differences that might exist don't matter to me, since
I'm not scoping this, and as far as I know, it's only Pro engineers and
Hummingbirds that might be able to hear the difference. As a musician, I'm
sure my hearing might not be as critical and detailed as it used to be, but
my audience is going deaf too. I'm more concerned with emotional impact, and
I have a room upstairs that I like to practice and sing in, a place where I
can keep it simple and just try to be creative without worrying about all of
my gear.
To sum up, here's the big question. Are there any simple, basic, inexpensive
machines, minidisc or otherwise, that will allow me to use the 4 channel
setup, as I listed above, and that will permit me to make a digital wav
transfer back to my PC? If so, what are some recommended models? I just need
something that will allow me to keep my digital output from the unit
seperate as it goes back into the PC.
Thanks for your suggestions.
Alan
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