My first studio in the early days was the Tascam Porta One Mini Studio. It used a standard cassette tape to get 4 mono tracks. Needless to say it did not sound great, but was invaluable in learning how to multi track record. The best you could do was get a drum, bass and guitar part down, bounce the 3 tracks to the 4th track in mono, and then get a few vocal tracks in by erasing the previous tracks. It was essentially a musical notepad, where you could lock in ideas. So, as a young man, that’s exactly what I did, I locked in a lot of ideas, but none were ever studio quality.
Tascam Porta One MiniStudio
Alesis ADAT
The recording devices did get better as the years went on, ADATs were essentially 8 track recorders using VHS tapes as recording media. You could link them together but FF, Rewind and syncing were slow and clunky. The sound was digital and the quality was much better but still, for me they were no more than a slightly nicer, more robust notepad than the one I had before.
Roland VS-1680
Next, was a digital, hard drive based, stand alone studio called the Roland VS-1680. It was definitely better than the first 2 options, and I did get some pretty good recordings out of it. It had the functionality of a modern DAW but the interface was very clunky and slow and difficult to use.
Cubase and Pro Tools
Finally, Cubase and Pro Tools came along and it revolutionized the home recording process. The recording and editing options became nearly limitless. But for me, I had done the majority of my recording before this point, so here I was stuck with over a hundred demos... and what to do with them?