Revisiting and transferring old recordings
(the story of encountered issues during the process)
Regular cassettes – used a second hand Kenwood KX3010 Cassette Deck to feed the stereo output straight into Logic. This involved more than 60 cassettes which were transferred into the digital domain. Sound quality is acceptable, having just regular casssettes as source material. This involved recordings from Fangorn to Unity and also various solo (test) recordings.
Regular tape deck material (including sound-on-sound recordings) – originally recorded on an Akai 4000DS MK II tape recorder, which I didn’t have anymore. So instead I was able to find a second hand Akai 4000DS tape recorder (less fancy), which allowed me to playback the material and capture all in the digital domain via Logic. This involved just 3 tapes with recordings from Fangorn, Simple and solo material. This may need some post-production work on the SOS source material.
TEAC M144 Portastudio cassettes – these are 4-track multitrack recordings which needed special hook-up to get all into Logic and synchronize the tracks. This involved more than 20 cassettes which were transferred into the digital domain. Sound quality is reasonable good, having a high-speed cassette as source material. This involved recordings from Simple and also various solo (test) recordings.
Tascam 22-2 tapes (master recordings) – these recordings contain Simple, Unity and solo material. The majority of these 15 tapes were already transferred to Logic and/or CD earlier or were produced from the original multitrack Portastudio cassettes, which were still available and accessible. Unfortunately one unique instrumental recording of Simple in 1984 could not be saved (see “Sticky reel to reel tape” issue)
Cubase MIDI files (Atari based) – from 1990 to 1998 an early version of Cubase on an Atari 1040 STe computer was used to control MIDI based hardware instruments. At that time audio could not be captured in Cubase, so that was ommited and after 1998 synchronized and added via the DA-88 recorder. The essential MIDI files (on diskettes) were all transferred to Logic (running on a Apple Mac G3) and the rest saved on DVD. The Atari computer (with Cubase) then left the studio and was sold.
Tascam DA-88 tapes (Hi-8) – these digital 8-track recordings were captured on Hi-8 video cassettes, normally used for video recording. These few tapes contain the source audio for the Unity CD “The Ultimate Encore” and my solo CD “Passage At Twilight”. My solo CD audio files were also imported into Logic, so I do have another digital source. For the Unity CD source this was not the case and it appeared that the Hi-8 tape carrying that material could not be fully read (see “Other observations”).
Early Logic files (Mac G3 versions) – the essential files were converted to a more recent Logic version (running on a Mac Pro) and the rest has been backed-up on DVD and/or Hard Drive.
Being a long term recording musician in my own home studio I have travelled the long way from old analogue media to new digital media for recording. This means that I still had loads of more than 40 year old reel to real tapes and Portastudio cassettes with unique recordings laying around.
Especially the reel to reel tapes and recorders can cause problems over the years. I had used the Tascam 22-2 recorder for mastering recordings done between 1981 and 1989. So the recorder and the resulting master tapes had actually not been actively used since.
Transferring the old (unique own) material from the old recorders and recording media was quite some work, which sometimes involved special care upfront. An overview from old to new media following my studio evolution:
With this major project (as good as) completed, my original music recordings are all available as digital computer files. These are regularly backed-up and stored in different places, just to be sure…
As mentioned there were some hurdles to be taken during this process, which will be further explained on the next page.