I tried something interesting yesterday, I first made my song in an orchestral format, then I replaced all the the instruments with synths. For instance I had a cello for the bass parts and violins for leads and pads and a banjo for the arps. You end up with more of a melodic track, but I think it has interesting results.
1 BigUp
So inspirational
1 BigUp
Can you record sounds from your laptop on to tape - like a C90 tape?
I want to record some stuff, drum loops, synth melodies on to tape and then rerecord it a bunch of times to degrade the sound, mess the tape up a bit, and then record the tape back ontp my laptop as a digital file.
I want that tape warmth, fuzziness and degradation vibe
I know I can get VSTs but I like the analog, physicality of manipulatiing the sounds.
Plus it’ll be a good story for when I’m on the front cover of Mixmag.
Edit. that last sentence is a joke btw.
I’m gonna be on kerrang
yeah ofc you can do that, just get a tape deck and record the output of your sound card. then play it back and rip the audio
look into portastudios, gold standard for cassette audio
1 BigUp
Yeah the portastudios I have are legit my fav and most used bits of gear. Real nice since you can turn the gain up crazy high to really get that tape compression going to a pretty extreme level.
It seems like they are getting pretty expensive now tho. $300+ for a tascam 414 is nutty
Used to see them everywhere for like $10-20. Got all of mine for free from friends just throwing em away
yeah bit silly but I would gladly pay double what I did for mine
you ever try syncing them? I think they do SMPTE timecode. my big problem was always running out of cassette tracks but if they’re syncable…
Tbh I would too. Like I said the 414 and 424 are pretty crucial in my work flow. Have much much more expensive stuff that gets used 10% as often.
I’ve never tried syncing both of mine before tbh. I rarely use them to actually record multitrack. More often using the 414 as a sub mixer for inputs which usually outputting into the modular for mangling. And the 424 as a sort of fx send from the interface for a parallel processing sort of mindset to layer back in with digital clean signal to keep some dynamics
1 BigUp
Also have a tascam summing mixer in my rack lol. I think I’ve got a bit of a fetish for those awful sounding pre’s
This one is modified tho with proper transformers which drops the noise floor way down and 1/4” jacks instead of RCAs
1 BigUp
i love them too, theres even guitar pedal clones of the porta pres
good transformers are everything, ive only ever run mine on a power supply i built but its so quiet for what it is. less noise than my real mixer. i have thought about swapping out the 4565 opamps or whatevers in there for something a lil nicer but i also dont want to lose the sauce
1 BigUp
Anyone know much about/used these?
Super expensive afaik. Seen them in a couple of high end studios, but haven’t read up on tech-specs etc.
Idk if this is the right place to ask but whatever. When recording a mix into audacity I currently record it quite loud then use the amplify effect to set the maximum level to -0.1 to cut down the peaks and gets everything sounding a bit more uniform. Generally they sound fine, but I’m assuming this isn’t ideal. Someone who knows what they’re doing tell me what’s the ideal level to record mixes and whether or not that amplify thing I’m doing is a complete no no or what
record lower and raise it afterwards is the usual consensus
Idk why I always thought it was bad practice to amplify a low recording level. Anyway will do that next time haha, cheers
You can just use ‘normalise.’
But yeah, a bit of a standard for music recording is to record it at about -6dB.
For more dynamic sounds like film dialogue, the standard is -20dB.
2 Likes
Finally installed a synth.
Ffs why didn’t I do this sooner?!
Already making some bait aphex twin ambient ripoff tracks.
There’s a lot of buttons and knobs
5 Likes
My First Synth 
My first synth was a Roland Juno-106 which I still have.
What synth did you install?
This one. I wanted a free one so I could play and learn without commiting to a financial cost.
And the ui is real nice
Still trying to figure it out. I need to be able to make basic wobs cuz I figure I should probably know that by now 
I know lfo to cutoff filter just not sure how that goes on this.
2 Likes
From the looks of the ui you can set two different modulation sources with positive and negative polarity in the drop-down menu to the right in the filter section. That in it self can make for interesting wubs if you combine say an lfo synced to DAW-tempo and an envelope.
1 BigUp