The Digital Revolution
These days it is possible to produce a finished CD-quality product in your own home, the
now much touted " home studio " - so named because it is in your home and not
the price of your home!
It is the digital revolution that has allowed Mr.Average to achieve
results that can rival most pro studios, and the point of this article is to explain what
you require to do so. Having said this, it is important to note that you cannot buy
experience - which is still often the divide between pro and home studios.
The Perils of Choosing a Recorder
Today’s home recording industry now offers a huge variety of choices. Of all the
musical instrument magazines it is the technology ones that are always full of new and
exciting devices. This often makes your buying decision fraught with dangers, not to
mention incomprehensible specs... and claims. You should read as many of these as you can,
such as Sound On Sound, Keyboard Magazine and others. They will give you unbiased reviews
and very useful tutorials and insights into the emerging technologies.
Despite all the confusion, you have three basic choices regarding
the recorder itself. These are A; the analogue cassette based multi track, B; the
stand-alone hard disk recorder and C; the computer based recorder that is also hard disk
based.
The cassette-based multi-track
This is the cheapest way to record your music, new machines will cost around R2500 upwards
and will generally let you record four tracks independently of each other and allow you to
mix them down onto a normal cassette machine or DAT. Another nice feature is that
you can "bounce" tracks, ie mix tracks 1, 2 and 3 onto track 4 and then let you
record more parts back onto tracks 1,2 and 3. This is all well and good but you should
note that even one pass at recording will inevitably dull the original piece and bouncing
will further reduce the quality.
You will also experience a cumulative build up of noise which is a
by-product of your tape being rather a noisy medium (refer to the first paragraph for a
cynical explanation). Tape however, is cheap and has been used for years and with caution
will provide quite reasonable results. If you do go for a cassette based multi-track try
to get one that runs at double speed as this gives more resolution to record at and will
help reduce the noise a bit. But these machines can cost almost as much as an entry-level
hard disk recorder. Another thing to note is that Fostex, pioneers in four tracks, now no
longer produce a cassette based recorder! The future is digital!
Name brands to look out for are amongst others; Fostex, Tascam and
Yamaha. If you are buying 2nd hand be very aware that the recording heads and the
mechanical parts which have possibly taken a beating. At the very least you should have
the heads de-magnetised, cleaned and aligned.
The stand-alone hard disk recorder
These machines were initially very expensive and were only found in the pro studios.
However, due to advances in computer technology and the economics of scale, they have
become increasingly popular. Generally they look just like a cassette recorder and also
have mixing facilities built in. The fundamental difference is that the incoming signal is
digitised and stored right on to a computer type hard drive. On playback the information
is read from the disk and converted from a digital signal back into an analogue one, all
at the fraction of a second, of course. These machines don’t require any extras
(other than a power supply that comes with it) and resultantly they are very portable.
Most of these machines also include digital effects as standard so you don’t have to
budget for extra reverbs or delays etc.
Due to the very nature of these machines there are little or no
moving parts so the sound quality of even the cheapest models will be far superior to the
best cassette version and certainly all but the most expensive reel to reel machines.
Going digital will also allow you to do multiple bounces with no noticeable side effects
(quality loss) and, unlike the cassette, you often have the ability to undo any operation
you may have regretted. Yet another bonus is that you can cut, copy and paste segments of
audio. This means that you could record your chorus backing vocals just once and then copy
them to other locations in the song - is your imagination going yet? At the time of
writing, the least expensive system is the new Fostex FD-4 ( this is a four track machine
)at around R4000 and the prices are likely to continue falling. Others to look out for are
the Roland VS-840, VS-880EX (both 8 track) and the VS-1680 (16 track). The Roland machines
have been extremely popular worldwide and are definitely the pioneers of affordable
digital recording. Things have already developed at quite a pace and a good 2nd hand
market is emerging. Even a well used digital machine should work perfectly well and need
no more than a re-formatting of it's hard drive.
History
