The Evolution Of Home Recording

MULTITRACK TAPE

In the nineteen eighties, there was an explosion of singer/songwriters creating “demo” tapes at home or in a small local studio. With the arrival of affordable reel-to-reel and cassette based multitrack recorders, the idea was to get the “guts” or the spirit of a song onto a cassette, send it to a big name group or a publisher, and then watch the dollars roll in when a major artist or group gave it the polish in a professional studio. The Fostex X-15 was the first four track machine which used standard cassettes. Instead of store-bought tapes that split an album into two sides and required the cassette to be flipped over, the X-15 used all four tracks at once and went twice as fast to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. The artist would tweak the volume, pan and EQ as the song mixed down onto a standard cassette deck. Although it was possible to make recordings with an impact, the expectation was never to make a tape which sounded like it came from a professional studio.

DIGITAL MULTITRACK

The first practical digital multitracks showed up in the early nineties. Digital offered the advantage of a cleaner sound and no disintegration with multiple takes. The machines had more sophisticated “on board” effects, which meant fewer cords, fewer machines adding unwanted noise. Soon home machines boasted not four tracks, but eight or sixteen. Home recording magazines taught the recording buff as well as the musician how to create recordings that began to rival the quality of the pro’s.

COMPUTER-BASED RECORDING

With the arrival of the first computer software recording “studios,” the line between what was possible in a large, expensive professional studio and what could be done at home became negligible. The number of tracks for one song became limitless, as did the number of sounds, or software “instruments” an artist could now employ. Editing on a large computer screen allowed precise cutting and pasting without the addition of any pops or glitches. The day of the “demo” was mostly over, with artists simply creating their own “broadcast quality” album ready for sale on the web or in a record store.