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.
8 TRACK TAPE IMAGES HOW TO
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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