Home Recording / Portastudios

Father Christmas is bringing me a very special present this year and he might be bringing it as early as in two week's time. I'm getting an eight track portasudio :yahoo:

I have always played guitar, since I was eight and play bass as well and do a little singing. I had a portastudio back in the eighties, back when they used tapes and got a lot of enjoyment out of it.

So now I'm reviving an old hobby and am very excited. I'm getting the Tascam DP 008 EX. I would love to hear from anyone who is into home recording as I would be grateful for any tips.

My husband plays the guitar and he thought about recording some solo tracks but never really knew how to do it without buying expensive microphones, amps, leads and software. Let me know how you get on and I'll relay this to him :)

I will let you know how I get on. The machine looks complex but I'm sure I'll work it out. I used to write my own songs so I want to get back into that again. Tascam make a smaller machine, the DP 006 which I nearly went for. On both machines, sophisticated mics are built in so all you need is a pair of headphones and you're away! No software is required. Portastudios really are all singing, all dancing these days. When you've mixed the song on the portastudio you can transfer it as a Wav file onto your computer and burn a CD of it.

Awesome, quite jealous of you getting that !

I'll defo forward that to the hubby, thanks for the info :)

Thanks Mike. I do feel very lucky. For my 50th birthday a year ago I got a super-short-scale bass which is really tiny and so comfortable to play so my little home studio is quite well equipped now. Maybe you can answer this question for me, Mike. I have a bass amp with a built in drum machine (Roland Micro Cube bass RX) and a little guitar amp (Roland Micro Cube.) I’ll be recording from these using mics at first but I was wondering, is it safe to plug the line out from the amps (“record-out socket”) straight into the portastudio’s line-in socket? I have a feeling I read somewhere that you are not supposed to do that? I don’t want to blow up my lovely new portastudio!

It depends on the amps, you should be able to in theory, but check the manual for the portastudio when you get it as sometimes you need to put other things in between them. Personally I would always mic them up anyway as they will sound a lot better. Just put the mic about an inch away from the speaker, off to one side, so not directly in the middle of the speaker.

That's great advice, thanks. :)