Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Portastudios – were they all they were cracked up to be?
I’m mainly aiming this at those who have ever actually used or owned or still own a portastudio (whether a real Portastudio™ or a generic cassette-based multitrack recorder).
Do you, now, in retrospect, think that the Portastudio way of making music was a good thing, or a bad thing?
Be careful not to be tempered by nostalgia and the feeling of achievement that you got from those early days. Be careful to put it into perspective. Imagine all the ways of making electronic music all started at the same time, so there’s no precedent, no “back in the day”. Now imagine which way is the way you’d adopt (or one of the ways).
- Question the first35 votes
- Yes, I wish nothing had moved on2.86%
- Yes, but with the addition of today’s ways too62.86%
- No, it was tedious hell, erase it from history25.71%
- No, I’m glad I also used computers alongside8.57%
Comments
I have been looking for a Four-track taperecorder recently. A thing i miss from them is the simple linearity of it. Record from start to finish, rewind, repeat for next track. Yes its probably a little tedious, but its also a very different way to record and it brings its own flavor. I should say i would probably mostly record guitar and bass and a drum machine (and kind of pretend i was a band, with guitar, bas, drums and perhaps a vocal or a synth)
Not sure what you’re getting at. When I started using a TASCAM 244 there was no more affordable way to do what it did. Some still use one form or another of multitrack tape while others are totally ITB or in some combination. It’s down to personal preference.
They were great, especially for what was available at the time I had mine, there were no Daws and I definitely couldn’t afford to go book a 24 track studio to record ideas back then. I had a Roland W30 workstation and would record the output to an audio track , sometimes stereo sometimes mono, and use the other track for vocals guitar and bass, and I got a lot of ideas down because I guess there was a more is less factor.
Portastudios were great. They were MUCH less expensive than a cheap multitrack reel-to-reel (particular when you realize you need a mixer) and took up a fraction of the space. It allowed tons of bands without money and songwriters to make their own demos.
Home digital multitrack wasn't a thing yet.
I had a tascam 4-track back in the day. For me it was the limitation of not being able to do tons of editing and having unlimited tracks that made you just commit and move on.
This reinforces the fact that a good song and good performance is much more important than sound quality or production.
For instance one of my favorite albums was Joni Mitchel's Song To a Seagull (1st album) and in terms of sound quality it was bad you can even hear bad clipping on songs like Night in the City etc
peace
I bought a 244 as soon as they were available. Very few musicians had access to multitrack recording in those days, and those who did payed a premium for the studio time. Local musicians from all around the city were soon getting in touch because my humble bit of gear was available for free. I did it all for the love of it, and I used to lay on homemade samosas etc.
We sometimes recorded at rehearsal studios, but on some occasions I had whole bands in my living room. Good times, but after a few years I grew tired of it, mostly because I was neglecting my own stuff and I got tired of finding cigarette burns in my living room couch.
Very nostalgic for my PortaStudio. My set up was the PortaStudio, Casio CZ100 and a Roland TR727. Yes it had a warm sound, even with a digital phase distortion synth. The drum box & synth got hooked up to a 512K Mac (software was on floppies) with really primitive sequencing software. If I only had the knowledge/skills I have now back then, I could have abused those tools much more than I did.
But yeah, bouncing was a PITA. :-)
Sigh...
Peter Gabriel worked on a kitchen radio and a piano, then his crew takes over ...
Yeah, still got mine. Recorded hundreds, possibly thousands of tracks on it. Got it second hand, mint condition in 1989 for £150.
Was thinking about it yesterday actually, the thing I miss most is the ability to slow a track down while i overdub a guitar line, to make it sound like I’m playing faster than I can. More of a hassle with a DAW, similarly backwards guitaring.
My Portastudio days were
Tascam 424; Yamaha SY77; Alesis HR-16b; Tascam MTS30 tape synchroniser; Yamaha FX500 effects (x 2); AKG mic & crap cheapo LH strat copy.
Later added Emu Proteus; Alesis MMT-8.
Later removed SY77; Proteus; MTS30 and added my first Oberheim Matrix 1000
(I’d moved, and in reduced circumstances, had only HR-16b+MMT8, Tascam 424, Oberheim Matrix 1000!)
Quite a bit later, moved again and added Korg S3 which gave me SMPTE tape sync!
Then started slaving to my Mac IIsi running Trax or AudioTrax, so the Portastudio days dwindled, but not entirely. I used to use it to load up overdubs, tape synced to the Korg MS stuff & other analogue stuff (thanks to Korg KMS-30, which I still have) and I’d use the mix playback faders as a kind of instrument.
Still have the 424 in the attic though, not fired it up for decades.
When I unboxed my 424 I wondered how I would ever be able how to figure out how to use it! 🤣
A few years ago I found an original tape that I hadn’t heard since I made it. I reversed and tweaked the tracks in my computer and found this little banger.
I used to record to 8 track synced or midi sequencer. I recorded the vocals and live instruments to tape and played all the drums and any synths from the sequencer and mixed down without ever committing the midi to tape.
I wish I had ;-)
Alessandro Cortini used a 4 track porta studio live with NiN; he basically recorded a chord drone per track and ‘played’ the chords with the faders.
It certainly makes for an interesting sound.
You can heat the portastidio vari speed effect on a lot of his music and also band like Boards of Canada.
The price of porta studios has gone way up of late.
Haha. You’ve hit the nail in the head. In those days it wouldn’t have mattered what kit I had... I spent every penny I could save on music gear and spent all my free time making music.
It wouldn’t matter what decade it was or what the gear was. It would have been the most productive gear i would ever use.
Nostalgia is a strong force.
The question only makes sense if you think in terms of what was available at the time.
I had a Fostex 4 track cassette recorder followed by a Roland VS840, recorded loads of tracks on both compared to a few finished tracks on PC and iOS. The key difference I think is sticking to limited instruments I could record - drum machine, bass and guitar plus a zoom sampler unit and they weren’t also my internet, email, tv, phone and texting devices.
I had one in the early 90s, did a ton of demos with it. There’s no doubt the iPad is infinitely more powerful though.
i love it! just bought a Tascam 424 after years with out one. So much fun!! having to commit to stuff is just great. plus its noisy, plus its crunchy, and you can just leave the fuckups and call it done! i run loops out of ableton into the tape machine and then back into ableton, just for some saturation and crunch!
Wow, my kind of thread! I've made probably too many references to PortaStudio's in comparison with iOS music production on this forum but it's where I came from.
I got my first four track in 1994, a Tascam 424, and used it to learn the basics of recording. In 1998 I upgraded to the eight track Tascam 488mkII PortaStudio, which was a beast. I love that machine and still have elements of songs recorded on it submixed to projects in Auria Pro & Cubasis 3.
If you want extreme detail I wrote a rundown of my PortaStudio experience at:
https://johnstevensonmusic.com/studiostories/
For me PortaStudio's forced you to become a good engineer or you'd be stuck with boom box recordings. Since it was an analog medium the litany of books on pro studio and home recording applied.
I learned so much from those books, trial & error and just general experimentation. You could still "defeat" PortaStudio's, meaning you could drive levels super hot to gain compression and overdrive saturation effects. Going over 0db in digital gives you caca.
While I love the PortaStudio work flow I am very appreciative of the ease of use & sound quality that digital delivers. In 2020 it's hard to recommend to a beginner a four track cassette recorder that goes for hundreds on ebay over GarageBand a free DAW.
But for those already invested in recording (experience and equipment wise) there's so much that can be done today with PortaStudio's. Looping, analog tape effects, varispeed techniques, etc. can be integrated with a standard desktop or iOS "interface->DAW" set-up. As I said my favorite technique is to use the PortaStudio to record drums, bass, riffy guitar, etc. and then transfer those tracks over to a digital session.
I have a big backlog of unfinished songs, rhythm tracks, demos, loops, etc. recorded with my Tascam 424 and 488mkII eight track over the years that I have overdubbed on using iOS DAW's.
I either take a stereo submix of the material and import it onto a stereo track or take the RCA tape outs from the tape machines and connect them to my interfaces line in's. Best of both worlds recording...
Missed mine. The OP-1 now fills a similarly constrained spot.
I got my portastudio 144 in 1981.
My first portastudio was a Tascam Porta 05.
Approximately 1991.
I made my first "album" on a borrowed Tascam Porta01. Maybe 1986 or so. I bought a Yamaha MT1X and made tons of recordings with that. I even bought another unit a few years ago with the hopes of going through boxes of cassettes in the garage. That hasn't happened yet...
“Do you, now, in retrospect, think that the Portastudio way of making music was a good thing, or a bad thing?”
When I got my Porta One It was the ONLY thing. Being able to multitrack was a technological godsend. I learned to do a lot with a little. In retrospect, my recordings were simplistic and crappy but so much fun. My family still drags out the Christmas albums I gave as gifts back then.
I still have that Porta One but technology has moved on and I’d never go back.
Vestafire 4-track. Back then gear acquisition was buying the best cassettes. I opted for the Maxell metal tapes. Just at a cheap mic from Radio Shack. Great nights.
Of course. Pick any moment in history and ask if the current technology is a good thing. At one point a sharp rock was as exciting as the iPad Pro.
I’m sure my mate had an 8 track version. Maybe I dreamed it?
@klownshed that video is awesome. i know what ill be doing for the next few weeks! thanks for sharing
There were some 8-track cassette based multitrack recorders
A buddy of mine had one so we did a band recording and it was a blast. A true revelation after months of four track constraints. That said, it was even smearier than the four track in terms of sound quality. Eight tracks on that little cassette tape was a good idea in theory, but...