Christmas isn’t all about extravagant presents, in fact it can be a time to reflect on the simpler things in life. With more four-track aficionados on the team than we’d like to admit, here Luke ‘fesses up with his Yamaha MT100 MkII.
What Is The Yamaha MT100 MkII?
Yamaha’s MT100 MkII is a 4 track recorder/mixer (aka Portastudio from Tascam’s widely-used brand name) from the 1990’s. Using consumer cassette tapes, these machines allowed musicians to record and mix multiple parts at home for demos or arrangement before the studio. These machines also powered countless rarities and guerilla releases on budgets that were strictly reserved for filling up the van for the next show…
Getting It Together
Back through the mists of time, the recording landscape was more polar than it is now. At one end were large format recording studios of which some still remain. At the other was a computer-free zone with few options to make recordings at home with any scope beyond mono or stereo sketches to tape. Without much middle ground, before the late 1970’s and early 1980’s you had to have a fair amount of money to record and mix and home. This involved open reel tape machines and mixers that could hardly be called accessible to all.
The late-twentieth century tech that was the small 4 track recorder/mixer changed all that. This allowed recording musicians to produce multitrack recordings and try out all kinds of different arrangements, harmonies, or experimentation before (or if) they were about to go into a ‘proper recording studio’.
OK so at their most basic, most could accommodate just four parts, although doing submixes to a spare track allowed many more to be layered up for home-spun tapestries of harmonies, overdubs and other studio tricks for artists on a shoestring budget.
Easy As ABC
These machines let you plug in and be recording faster than with your shiny new M3 if you didn’t mind working in their narrow sweet spot in between the waist-deep hiss and saturated grunge of your average cassette tape. The MT100 also had a five (!) band graphic EQ that could be recorded or mixed through for all kinds of improvements, and DBX noise reduction that was a bit heavier handed than its more common Dolby rival. With many machines only letting you record one or two tracks at a time, this machine’s decadence stretched to Direct mode to record all four tracks at once…
As with all these machines, their technical limitations meant that sound quality was far from what most would consider to be “release quality”. Even a simple mixdown would give you a second-generation recording where a multitrack cassette mix was re-recorded back to another tape recorder. Although getting more than four parts using track bouncing and live input could squeeze the track-count into double digits, this meant that the final master could easily contain third or even fourth-generation recordings for the brave.
I Want You Back
Despite the technical shortcomings, I loved my 4-track, and so did all my friends and bandmates who would gather round to play their part for that overdub or the final mixdown. I actually didn’t mind the practical limitations with the MT100 because it’s all I knew. If anything it made me a better engineer, able to plan ahead, record with EQ and my trusty MIDIverb 3, and produce the best bounces I could when faced with recording over source tracks.
If any of this sounds like a whole different lexicon to working in the DAW it’s because it pretty much was.
I absolutely loved my MT, which taught me everything about getting the basics right and using my ears. To this day I don’t quite know what I was thinking when I unceremoniously gave it to an electrical dump when the ‘soft’ transport stopped working.
On second thoughts, please can I have a time machine for Christmas instead?