Recently Russ wrote an article about his first home studio, though in this context “studio” needs quotation marks! The article was very popular and as a follow up I thought I’d share my first “studio” (there are those quotation marks again).
I’m a handful of years younger than Russ and I was in my early twenties when I got my first setup so the period is different, but the gear is not all that different. I’d experimented with dubbing cassettes on a dual cassette deck before but my first taste of ‘real’ multitrack happened in about 1993. Here’s the details:
Yamaha MT2X 4 track
I bought this from someone my girlfriend worked with who knew I played the guitar. It was second hand and I think I paid £200 for it. I knew nothing at all about portastudios. I had no idea whether it was a good one or whether it was a good price. Pre-google you couldn’t check prices easily. To be honest I don’t remember my 4 track as fondly as many seem to. It was OK but any good work I did on it was good in spite of it, not because of it. As soon as I got to 8 tracks I was overjoyed to leave the portastudio behind…
Looking at this magazine article from 1988 it seems a more informed opinion is that my MT2X was just as ‘OK’ as I remember it. The DBX was heavy handed but I didn’t have strong feelings about it. I liked the fact you could record to all four tracks at once, something not every portastudio could do, and I liked the fact that it had two extra inputs in the mixer. Recording extra parts at mixdown meant you could get a cleaner sound on these parts as they missed at least one generation on tape. Being able to record at double speed was a great benefit too, it sounded much better when barrelling though my precious Maxell XLIIs extra fast.
The varispeed control was useful as I soon found that recording bass guitar with the tape running slow enough to drop the pitch by a semitone and playing the part a half step down really tightened things up when played back at normal speed. It got awkward when you were playing in E or were relying on open strings but it was a useful trick in these pre-compression days.
The design of the case was awkward though. This was in the days before I’d worked out that a dry paintbrush is the only way to keep gear dust-free and the ridged case was a total dust trap! The portastudio is long gone but I noticed some years ago that my mum still keeps her christmas decorations in the cardboard box it came in.
Digitech PDS 2000 2 Second Sampling Delay Pedal
I really was a bit starved of gear in those days but ever since I’d borrowed a Frontline analogue stereo delay pedal some years before I’d been (and remain) a complete delay junkie. In the late 80s/early 90s digital equalled ‘better’ and I bought this PDS 2000 double width sampling delay pedal off a guitarist friend I shared a house with at University. It was definitely my secret weapon. A 2 second delay was a big deal in those days but even better was the ability to sample and trigger audio. My favourite trick was to overdub loops over loops using the infinite repeat feature. This is very much like a modern looper pedal but far more difficult to use. You could built amazing textures but one wrong move and it was ruined…
The sound was poor. It would be prized today for its grainy, early digital sound but at the time I just wanted it to be a bit cleaner!
Roland Juno 106 Synthesiser
This really illustrates how times have changed. I bought this second hand from a music shop for £200 in 1988. No-one wanted them at the time but I remembered seeing big grey Roland synths played by Ultravox on the TV years earlier and I bought it without really knowing what it was.
Adored in 2024, I liked this synth but in those gear-poor days the lack of reverb and delay mattered far more to me than the (admittedly very cool) oscillator sync leads sounds and lush pads it could make, this was largely why I bought the Digitech delay.
One thing this synth did for me was feed my interest in the use of computers in audio as I had a MIDI equipped synth and really wanted a sequencer to go with it. Up until that point I had zero computer experience. I’m sure I’m the last person in the UK to do a degree without touching a computer! After some experiments with a hardware sequencer I got a copy of Cubase and this ultimately led to me getting started with computer audio years sooner than my peers.
Sony TCFX6-C Cassette Deck
Of course with an analogue portastudio the best case for your audio recordings was that a version heard by anyone other than you was going to be a third generation cassette copy. Of course internal bounces to up the track count on a 4 track recorder could mean elements would have been through far more than three generations of tape. If you recorded audio to your 4 track, you needed to create a stereo master. Unless you were better resourced than me and had a DAT machine you were going to be creating your stereo master on analogue tape and at this end of the market, that would be on a cassette deck. This master would then be copied onto cassettes or, if you were really proper, a small run on vinyl!
My masters were recorded onto this very nice cassette deck from the 80s. I bought it for a steal and it was a great machine until the fancy electronic transport stopped working. It had Dolby C which was far superior to the much more ubiquitous Dolby B.
Realistic PZM Microphones x2
As for microphones, In these analogue days there was no such thing as a mic which was too bright. The affordable condenser revolution as started by Rode in the 90s hadn’t really happened yet. The AKG C1000 was a notable exception here but I had a pair of the very popular Realistic/Tandy PZM mics and their brightness was a lifesaver. I’ve always thought the popularity at this time of the very bright AKG C451 is an indication of how valued brightness was in a mic in the analogue tape days. Compare that to today where we’re using ribbons again. Ribbons were very out of favour at this time.
Shure Prologue 10L Dynamic Microphone
My other mic was a cheap dynamic. This budget version of the Shure Unidyne from the Prologue range exemplifies everything bad about dynamic mics. Insensitive and middly this was used for almost everything. Until I got the PZMs I was using it to record drums. Using a single mic those recording were bad, but perfectly phase coherent… But my choice of stand was interesting - taped to a broom leaning against a chair definitely happened at least once…
I resurrected this mic during my teaching days as a good candidate for demonstrating the reversible nature of electrodynamic transducers, i.e. how you can use a dynamic mic as a speaker and a speaker (more usually a pair of headphones) as a mic. Actually the first recording I made on my portastudio was made using a pair of headphones instead of a mic, I had gone to my friend’s house on the way back from picking it up and we wanted to record something there and then!
No Monitors?
You’ll notice there is no mention of monitoring. That’s because I didn’t really have any. I never set up in a ‘Studio’ of any sort. I really bought into the ‘porta’ part of ‘portastudio’ and recordings were made and mixed at band practices, or over weekend-long jam sessions. Monitoring was courtesy of whatever stereo or hi fi was available which had a suitable line input.
It’s funny to think back to this time because what I see very clearly is that I didn’t yet think of myself as a wannabe sound engineer. At this time I was the most technical one in a group of friends who wanted to play music. Obsessing about details came later. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing very much depends on you point of view.
Juno 106 Image By Iainf 06:01, 18 June 2006 (UTC) - Own work, Public Domain,