Question about home recording gear

[TraditionalCountry]

Back when dinosaurs still walked the earth and I was just a kid with a $50.00 Harmony arch top guitar and reel to reel recorders were king of the recording hill you could buy what was called a "sound on sound" tape deck.
This cool contraption allowed you to sing and play rhythm and then go back afterward and add some lead work on top of your original vocal/rhythm track,the end result was a kind of one man band thing recording.

Speeding forward,now to 2006 how would you do that same bit of magic on a modern cassette deck or even a cd recorder?Would it be a common feature on current home recording gear?

And does any modern so called "four track" cassette recorder as seen in the catalogs from Musicians Friend,Music123,etc, allow you to do the one man band thing?
Thanks,
Malcolm

[bendaway]

Originally Posted by TraditionalCountry

Speeding forward,now to 2006 how would you do that same bit of magic on a modern cassette deck or even a cd recorder?Would it be a common feature on current home recording gear?
And does any modern so called "four track" cassette recorder as seen in the catalogs from Musicians Friend,Music123,etc, allow you to do the one man band thing?

Tascam first came out with the cassette Portastudio in 1979. It does what you are talking about: overdubbing. The modern four track cassette recorders you see are improvements of the same technology. Computers are usually are the way to home record now days.

[woodman]

yep, it's all going to digital now, for many evident reasons (instant rewind, cut-n-paste, automated remix, sound-wave editing etc.). i'm still stuck in the stone age with the Tascam 8-track recorder, but for sketching out songs i've written, it's dandy. even made a crude lil self-produced album on it. i started with the Tascam 4-track, but ping-ponging channels really eats away at your quality.

[bendaway]

I had a Tascam 424 for a few years in the 90's, then sold it. Had fun and learned a lot about the basics of multi-track recording. I want to get back into home recording using my computer, while spending as little as possible. Right now it is a vocal mic or instrument pickup going through an ART Tube mic preamp into the line-in of the standard sound card. Audacity seems to be the best free software and gives me MP3 file output. For now I just intend to record some solo guitar tracks. Any more helpful suggestions would be great.

[eddiewagner]

i was recording in the 80ies with a fostex cassette-thing. awful!!!! i tried little palmstudios as well: pretty cool. 8 track harddisk recorders: also pretty cool. but the best for me is to record with a computer. thats the first time ever i got a halfway decent drumtrack togeteher, just with copy and pasting loops. its supereasy. you can easily edit you guitartracks as well, because you can seen them. i have an apple computer, which has a homerecording-program anyway. i dont know about windows, but there has to be some good free programs as well. i can only recommend recording with a computer.

[maestrovert]

i've been using a Fostex MR8 as a "handy to have along scratch/notepad", and i have a Korg D1200 w/cd burner.....(there's been a couple of releases lately done entirely on the D1200's bigger brother the D1600, namely HankIII's and Forrest Lee Jr.'s)....
i also have a Gnx4, and have been using the included Pro Tracks software on the 'puter...



Even the Fostex MR8 has much better sound quality, not to mention capability than the cheesy reel to reels i started with so many decades ago....

[Tim Armstrong]

I invested less than a thousand bucks in recording hardware and software and have recorded two full-band CDs for commercial release (some samples at The Mood Swingers). We're in a brave new world for home recording gear!

Of course, having recording gear is like having guitar gear, you can have great stuff but you need to learn how to play!

I'd also add that recording on a computer can be a buttpain sometimes (like when your computer has a lot going on already, or is older/slower/buggy) and you might look harder at one of the digital all-in-one recorders. Lots of good stuff out there!

Cheers, Tim