Re: Gear plug: Tascam 564

[buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)]

>one bounce forward so far, but I've got grave doubts as to the =
>usability of four generations of "bounce four tracks into one" with =
>modern ears.  It's one thing for the Beatles or Brian Wilson to have =
>crammed everything together into the glorious Wall-o-Mono, but thirty =
>years down the road...

Back when my 4-track worked, I had good decent results on tape with
bouncing to an external stereo mix, then back, which let me add 2 tracks
to a stereo mix every 2 tape bounces.  I did two recordings with
10 tracks (and many with 8) this way; I just had to be careful to make
sure that the first parts recorded don't care about high-end loss or are
relatively down in the mix (and you have to get pretty good about
anticipating the entire mix during bouncedown, which is an otherwise
worthless skill).  These days, using a DAT would halve the number
of tape generations.

Stereo "bounce ahead" would work pretty well for this, but I don't
suppose that's a feature on the minidisc multitracks?

Much as I've suggested that MIDI looping could do lots of
things audio looping can't, I wish digital recorders weren't
so tied to the "tape multitrack" metaphor.  There's no reason
in software you can't mix arbitrary numbers of tracks together,
not in real-time, but as far as I know, all of the computer-based
"digital multitracks" still require you to manually bounce things
down yourself, rather than automate the process.  But this is
getting way off topic...

Sean Barrett