Time Trial

[Zukan]

Nice one Sam. Thoroughly enjoyed that article.

[Sam Inglis]

Thanks -- it was very much a team effort, I just wrote it up. It was a very interesting project (and one I think none of us would be all that keen to repeat anytime soon!).

[muzines]

Can't believe no-one in the SOS production office has experience of working like that!

For the next article, can you recreate a song by nicking your nearest siblings' cassette decks and bouncing between two of them to create multitrack recordings in mono, please, from instruments and gear bought from Argos in 1980-82, for the full experience.

(Extra bonus points for spinning in audio samples manually from micro-cassette dictaphones.)

Ta!

(Great article, especially the bit where you hired that vintage classic gear that everyone loves, hooked it up, and it sounded horrible! nostalgia is great, but it's not at all accurate )

[Music Wolf]

Picked up my copy today but only skimmed it. Off to the Lakes tomorrow for weeks holiday (I use the term reservedly) with wife, child, parents and mother in law - and it looks as though it's going to be a wet week, so I'm saving it.

Have to say that, from the crafty peek I've taken, it's taking me right back there. Maybe more to the early 90s when I got my Fostex 8 track reel to reel and Soundcraft desk. Mid 80s I was still on a 4 track Portastudio.

The bit about 'only Dave Lockwood worked in 80s home studios' made me feel very old - bloody kids

[Ben Asaro]

I am really looking forward to reading this tomorrow. Happy anniversary, SOS!

[James Perrett]

After reading that article I got the feeling that you made the classic mistake that many newbies made in that era - buy loads of gear and expect it all to make you sound brilliant. That's exactly what happened to one of the people that I set up our studio with - he came home one day from Thatched Cottage with a whole bunch of kit that would have even taken me 6 months to learn. As an almost total newbie he had no hope.

There was a good reason for starting with a basic setup and then adding as you went along.

[Matt Houghton]

The bit about 'only Dave Lockwood worked in 80s home studios' made me feel very old - bloody kids

While I can't personally claim much credit for the article or the track (I think they used my Yamaha reverbs and MIDI cables... but that's about it), I just about scraped into the 80s 'thing'. I'd hesitate to call it a home studio, though... a dynamic mic, a Tascam Porta 05 and an old Hitachi open reel stereo machine and a Yamaha AWM synth and drum machine of some sort. And some sequencing software I've long since forgotten the name of running on an 8086 and later a 386 PC. There. Hope that makes you feel better. I certainly feel old having thought about all that.

[Hugh Robjohns]

Can't believe no-one in the SOS production office has experience of working like that!

Frightening isn't it... but then police officers and doctors all look like school-leavers to many of us too!

Dave, PW and I all have pretty thorough backgrounds of working in the tape era, but PW and I don't work from the office, so we weren't on hand to help out. And every one else in the office is so much more youthful and largely untainted by the constraints and frustrations of the analogue era!

H