Post by Steelpriest on Mar 29, 2004 16:40:46 GMT -5
I started with homerecording in the early 90´s when 4- and 8-track cassette studios became affordable. I always loved the analog stuff and I wanted to buy a 16 track 1" machine, but unfortunately these nice devices became out of fashion already in 2002. After some thinking I decided to buy a Korg D1600 HD workstation, because it seemed to be very alike the analog 8-track multitrackers I used up to then. At least it has 16 hardware faders and analog pan pots for each channel. It is a 16 track plus 112 virtual track HD recorder that records uncompressed wave data on an internal HD with 16 bit resolution when used as a 16-track. It has lots of built in effects and you can make awesome mixes from the music you recorded, it also has an aux for one external effects device. But it took me months to achieve the first useful results. Oh boy, the handbook looks like a telephonbook of a not so small village, hehe... and going through this brevier did take some time, I still have it close at hand to look up for some things still. When recording all settings on this machine are "flat", I only record on the tracks and use it like one would use an analog tape. For the input section I still use an analog console with two sideracks (with hardware noisegates, equalisers, FX devices, compressors, etc.) which allows me to adjust things more intuitively. I hate to step through endless parameters on the D1600 and turn jog dials, the only thing I do on it is set the input values to so called "unity gain" to have a decent headroom and start the tape... *lol* I still say tape though it is a HD. Having recorded all the tracks of a song the D1600 delivers lots of effects, equalizers, editing options, whatever you like... It was simply learning by doing. A finished mix can be stored on the internal HD and you can burn it unto CD/R with the built in CD burner. The final mix from this CD is then imported on my PC on which I run Logic Audio Platinum. I only use Logic for mastering, that means for a final overall equalisation, sum compressoring (is that the correct technical term?) and proper fade in and outs. Or I put together seperately recorded two or three parts of a song. Once I recorded on a Windows based Cubasis (was it the affordable light-version of Cubase?) system a pal had at that time, it was a horrible nightmare, because we all know that Windows is absolutely realiable, hehehe... on some days when we began to record again we found the single tracks from the previous day scattered around somewhere on the HD and had to re-synchronize them before we could do anything further. So I decided never to record important things like music on a PC again. All in all it is great fun to record, but somehow things got out of hand, hehe... and I don´t consider this what I do as pure homerecording anymore, the gear grows and grows, when I look at all those cables and wires in my living room I must say it is not much of a livingroom anymore... 
