The simplicity of 8‑track may even allow you to put more of your energy into the song, which will give you a far better chance of success than simply having the 'best' equipment. Although publishers always want to be 'wowed' by the quality of the demo, despite what they sometimes say, if you get a really good singer and make a simple but supportive arrangement for the song, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to sell your song from a demo originally recorded on 8‑track. You may want to be a songwriter and do song demos in your studio. You may simply want to gain experience in recording with a view to going into it professionally, and from this point of view, 8‑track is ideal, because you have to work harder to achieve a successful recording. Whether you have a recording or a MIDI studio, there are several different types of work you may do. Multitrack tape is an optional extra in this case. The MIDI studio, on the other hand, can generate a considerable number of independent musical lines without ever going to tape until the final mix. ![]() For a recording studio, the number of tracks on the tape is a very important feature of the studio, since the more tracks it has, the more flexible it can be. There is a real difference, I feel, between a recording studio, where the main activity is capturing sound with a microphone, or the electrical signals from the audio output of a keyboard or sampler, and a MIDI studio, which in technical terms is more of a data‑processing operation until the final mix. Some people record music, others record from synthesizers and samplers! I'm sure you'll forgive my little joke, because I use my synth and sampler all the time, but there's nothing like the pleasure you get from a successful recording of an acoustic or electric instrument, or voice. In fact, I have just made a CD including some of the tracks I made years ago with this machine and they sound better than more recent ones I did with a Fostex E16. The sound quality of these recorders can be very good I used to have a Tascam 38, and although the amount of noise it generated (it didn't have built‑in noise reduction) used to irritate me, by the time I had finished mixing, carefully fading tracks in and out as necessary, I was usually more than pleased with the result. Your analogue 8‑track will almost certainly be a Fostex or a Tascam, so I'll aim my comments at this type of machine. I'm going to forget 8‑track hard disk for now, because it's very much a minority activity, although I don't think I'll be saying the same thing this time next year. These days, 8‑track recorders come in three varieties: analogue, digital and hard disk. ![]() Having 24 tracks is a brute force answer to the problem, but 8‑track users can solve it with intelligence. But you can get around this with a little thought and planning. The limitations of 8‑track, a common recording format, are obvious - it takes more than eight instruments to make a modern recording. ![]() It's a fact of life that home recordists and project studio owners will always want more tape tracks - but just because you have a limited number of tracks available, this doesn't mean that you can't compete with the big boys who have 24‑track. David Mellor passes on a few tricks to help 8‑track users expand their recording horizons - including how to get 20 tracks from 8. In these days of practically unlimited MIDI sequencer tracks, just eight tape tracks can seem frustratingly few.
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