Stop whinging about workflow!!

[Sascha Franck]

Did you ever to wind the tape speed / pitch up to the highest setting in order to squeeze out a little more "fidelity" ?

On the Fostex X-15, the pitch dial allowed for roughly 3 semitones up/down pitching. So what I was doing was to record whatever guide tracks with the pitch all the way to the left (hence lowest speed), then turned the thing up all the way to the right (so it was 6 semitones higher), then tuned the guitar 6 semitones down and recorded at that setting. When I then dialed the pitch back, the combination of the pitch dial mayhem and tuning the guitar down resulted in "something" 12 semitones lower. Hence, a bass! The fact that I had to record in some strange keys at vastly higher than the indended speeds (so while tracking my "bass" everything sounded like chipmunks) on extremely flubby strings didn't exactly help when creating proficient bass lines.

 

[Sascha Franck]

Any of you who are used to programming midi in your DAW, try doing it with one of these! You have NO idea!

Ninja level: Try doing it without any MIDI keyboard. Which is what I did. No wonder I call that my "mininalism" phase.

 

[Sleezy E]

It's my workflow and I'll whinging if I want to.

 

[jellodog]

View attachment 18136

Interesting. It's extremely plausable that the young guy in this photo could indeed grow up to become Don Draper!

 

[norminal]

Oh, and I just need to add this for those not familiar with this type of Midi sequencer…

There wasn’t a floppy drive or hard disk in these. Unless you had the separate floppy drive, you had to save your Midi files via cassette recorder.

 

[metropolis_4]

This is where I cut my teeth with digital music gear:

Nothing scares me anymore.

 

[Sascha Franck]

Unless you had the separate floppy drive, you had to save your Midi files via cassette recorder.

Which, given the wellknown reliability of compact cassettes and their recording/playback devices, very obviously worked like a charme.

 

[norminal]

Which, given the wellknown reliability of compact cassettes and their recording/playback devices, very obviously worked like a charme.

Oh, it did. It was just a major pain in the ass at the time. I couldn’t afford the floppy drive, so I had to make the best of it.

 

[Sascha Franck]

"Back in the days, when the FAS UI experience would've been a revolution in efficiency."

 

[Sascha Franck]

Oh, it did. It was just a major pain in the ass at the time. I couldn’t afford the floppy drive, so I had to make the best of it.

I think I actually only ever backed mine up once, and it's rather been a testdrive. See above, for the most time, I didn't have a MIDI keyboard, and for those minimalistic bleeps and blobs, the internal memory seemed to be fine. Let alone I always instantly recorded everything to tape anyway.
Fortunately, not too long after I was able to afford an ST 1024

 

[ragingplatypi]

When I was a senior in high school I got to do a final project which was making my first “album” on the portastudio. After weeks of work, my “master” cassette tape developed a wrinkle. I was devastated.

The only real workflow I’ll probably never unlearn is the layout of a Roland drum kit on a piano keyboard.

 

[Piing]

I miss the high-pitch noise of the MIDI Clock Tape Sync Track cross-leaking to the other tracks at my DAW

Nostalgia at 3:05


I used it to sync the Yamaha RX5

 

[yek]

I programmed drums on a drum computer somewhere in the 80s-90s, I forgot what brand. It could only backup to tape. And of course that failed often, so I had to program everything from the start again. I'm still kind of proud of the tracks I did back then.

 

[Frodebro]

Yep. I cut my teeth on a Fostex (and then a Tascam 4 track), a boss drum machine, a shitty crate amp, and an SM57. Usually a pretty good hint the generation one belongs to when workflow of a modeler is a super critical decision point.

For me it was a Vesta-Fire 4 track, Alexis HR16B drum machine, and a Rockman running direct. That was my “advanced” rig. Prior to the acquisition of the 4 Track I used two cassette decks and a Realistic line mixer. I would record a drum track, then bounce it to the second machine while playing along with it. Then that would be bounced back to the first machine while I played the next part. And so on. There was no punching in, and if I screwed up I would have to start from the beginning. Generation loss was bad, but it worked.

 

[Boudoir Guitar]

4-track workflow wasn't that bad, honestly -- because there were so few options. Unless you were having to bounce, to free up tracks. And then the nerves of committing to a mix were...awful. Or striping time code and later mixing pristine synth stuff with...less pristine cassette-recorded stuff...

Those hardware sequencers (Qy10 for me) though, were. Whew.

 

[pipelineaudio]

I’m so goddamn triggered I’m going to punch you all in the dong

 

[Ed DeGenaro]

80s…Yamaha RX11 and DX7 into TASCAM 424.
Boy was the Ensoniq ASR-X a step up

 

[laxu]

Let's all go back to Fasttracker2.

 

[norminal]

Let's all go back to Fasttracker2.

All fun and games until you get one of these:

 

[Orvillain]

Proper copy protection: