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Looper's Delight
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At 2:21 PM -0700 7/9/04, Legion wrote: >I found my old 4track last week in a box...the unit is cool as hell >in features. I have one of these, and I agree that it's pretty nifty for a cheap old 4-track cassette deck. I bought one back in 1985, intending to use it as it was designed to be used - as a 4-track recorder with sync overdub capability. I soon found that it was even more fun as part of a playback system for soundscapes. The principal advantage of the Porta One is that it operates at the same speed as a normal cassette deck (higher-end Portastudios ran at double speed). That obviously means that it can be used to play back tapes recorded on other decks, and because it is a 4-track this also means you can play back both the Side A and the Side B tracks. Side B will be backwards! My typical setup was to use the Porta One in combination with one or two regular cassette decks and one or two CD players, and in later years in combination with a couple of Eventides and a Mackie 1604. I set the system up so that I could feed any of the sound sources into the Eventides without the direct signal going into the mix, thereby having a wide range of "recognizability" due to having straight playback, backwards playback, and playback with heavy processing. My source material consisted of anything I had accumulated during my cassette years: punk/new wave, world music, classical, 20th century avant garde, spoken word, etc. I also had a few 4-track loop cassettes of spoken word and sound effects. The only potential downside is that the Porta One uses dbx noise reduction, whereas most regular cassette decks use Dolby. I'd just turn the noise reduction off, figuring that amid the sonic mayhem it wouldn't make any difference. -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com