07.01.11
Step away from the app and your iKit slowly and I won’t shoot
A $10 app purports to duplicate a piece of revolutionary home-studio kit from the Eighties, the 4-track cassette recorder. Well, the look of it, anyway.
I used what was known as a Fostex X-15 to record the first Dick Destiny & the Highway Kings LP, Arrogance.
The app for the iPad is for the Tascam Portastudio, a similar piece of old hardware.
Both pieces of original gear were in the $300-500 range, as I recall.
It was harder to make a decent multi-track recording than the appearance of a cheap app for iKit now makes it look.
Since cassette speed was slow and recording area much smaller compared to analog reel-to-reel tape, it was difficult but not impossible to duplicate high fidelity recordings done with traditional studio gear. And the azimuth on the recording head had to be corrected fairly frequently or the quality took another big hit.
It was also good to have a decent bit of quality tone-shaping gear outboard to get the best signal to the cassette tape.
I used a couple compressors and, most spectacularly, the very first iteration of the Scholz Rockman, now known as the Rockman 1.
(Here’s some 2008 duplication of some of the guitar tones from the Rockman line of gear on the old blog. In this case, I’m demo’ing a Rockman rackmount called the Sustainor which came a long a few year after the original headphone models.)
The Rockman was sold as a high-end piece of guitar gear meant to put great studio sound to tape with a minimum of fiddling. It subsequently wound up all over hit records in the Eighties. That decade’s hits from ZZ Top and Def Leppard have Rockman-treated guitar all over them.
I don’t miss the Fostex X-15 and analog cassette-recording gear. But my systemic hatred of all things app and iKit prevent me from being more than passingly interested in this new piece of ‘retro’ recreated for the digital world. To be totally retro it would have to duplicate the bass hump that occurred on old cassette tape when you did multi-track bounces on these things. And it would somehow have to recreate the warm coat of analog “furz” that resulted when you tried to cram multi-layers of sound onto the old physical format.
Sure it’s cheap. However, the platform isn’t and you can get similarly fiddly 4-track digital recording hardware stand-alones for less.
Here’s an old newspaper piece from 1987 briefly discussing how Arrogance was made on the X-15.
“By day, he is George Smith, a clean-cut [blah-blan]… ” it reads.
Clean cut. Eesh.
And the first DD fundraiser marathon goes on.
Buddy, can you spare a dime?