Did I mention my "drums"?
So, years ago I bought one of those toy electronic drum pad things at a thrift shop.  My intention then was to take out the loudspeaker and replace it with a 1/4" mono jack, so I could use a guitar cable to run it into the four-track.  I finally got around to doing this a couple weeks ago.  It works, but it's noisy and some of the drum sounds are far louder than others.  So I plugged it into the Digitech pedal, and played around with the compression and noise gate, so I can get a decent input level.  There's still a slight noise problem, but other instrument sounds should probably mask it in the mix.  Besides, these "drums" are a supplement to the Digitech's built in patterns, not a flat-out replacement.  If I want to say, switch to half-time, I'll just play along on the drum pad, and then take out the Digitech pattern during mixdown.  Any step towards increasing the dynamic range of my recordings is a good one, even for the lowest-fi.

Okay, so that experiment from last night?  I tried it again, using a reference CD, and I mixed it down to a lossy digital format.  I'll use it to practice along with to avoid extra wear on the tape, as I have one more track to record on this tape before I mix it down for real.

More Experimentation (with mixdown)
A moment ago, I did a quick experiment to see if I could improve the mix of an extremely lo-fi four-track cassette recording (of an absolutely epic new song by The Anderson Council).  First I plugged my headset into the TASCAM Porta07 on which it was recorded, and dialed in the best mix I could get with no processing of any kind.  Then I ran the line out into two of the mic/line inputs of the TASCAM 244, and did some additional EQ.  I patched the Digitech RP300 guitar processor into the effect send of the 244.  I set up some compression and a noise gate*, and just for fun I threw in a little reverb.  Not surprisingly (to me, anyway), the mix sounded far better this way than by just running the processor through the Porta07.  This was just a quick experiment to see how it sounded.  I did not record the mix to two-track, because I'm too tired tonight.  Besides, I wasn't using a audio reference.

By the way, I know that a guitar effects pedal is not the greatest thing to use for mixes, but this is lo-fi.  Besides, I 'm using the best gear that I have right now.


*I leave the DBX turned off, or else it sounds like crap.  A gate is the way to go.

Wikipedia,org's article on Lo-Fi recording.

Which leads to this one on Cassette Culture.

Recording, Planning, Re-recording

A favourite recording blog of mine has advised against the "write as you record" approach.  I however, must defend this way of doing things.  You see, I know that anything I write as I record is not going to be a usable, final product; nor is it a waste of tape (I've mentioned I still use tape, right?).  This is what I call a "pre-demo", and is absolutely critical to my creative methods at this point in time.  I need mistakes to learn from, and I need to get the idea down on tape in order to plan a re-recording of the same song.  

Once I have my pre-demo tape, I can take a step back and think about how I'm going to arrange the next recording.  During my break at work today, I took out my notebook, and drew a flow chart depicting which tracks would be on the first tape, then bounced to the second and so on.

One advantage of having a 4-track running at standard tape speed is that once I bounce to another tape (standard 2-track deck), I don't need to bounce  back; I just move the 2-track tape into 4-track and top it up.  Lately though, I have come to realize that my decks need to be cleaned and demagnetized.  I have ordered a demagnetizer and some cleaning fluid online, but I still wish to record in the meantime, at least just for practice.  I'll still get a nasty-sounding tape in the end, but it's all to gain experience points.