How did people record music before DAWs and visual timelines?

Svetlovska

@richardyot : Now that would be a good AUV3 for someone to develop: an AUM File Player replacement where each instance just functioned exactly like a single per channel reel to reel, synced to the AUM transport, with fast forward, reverse, punch in and out... You can already simulate tape spin up and slow down scrubbing by applying an LFO to the File Player rate as the track plays, so it might be possible... ?

bygjohn

@Apex said:
It was done by using your ears not your eyes.

Still done nowadays to to some extent. Just look at the used prices for reel to reels (ATR’s) and cassette 4 tracks.... They’re through the roof. Still to this day nothing sounds quite as good as a high end tape machine being hit hard.

I find it quite amusing that there are so many tape emulation plugins trying to replicate all the stuff we wanted to get rid of when tape was the only option, eg hiss, warble, flutter, limited frequency response.

I worked with a friend who had a Tascam Portastudio for a while (previously I just bounced between two tape machines overdubbing stuff), then bought a Fostex cassette four track. I can remember getting really excited when I bought a Tascam tape sync unit, which meant I could synchronise the tape machine with Cubase on an Atari, though it meant losing one of the four tracks to do it. Basically it recorded a warbling tone on the track it used than encoded MIDI clock and song position pointers.

Audio recording going into DAWs was a revelation. You could just treat the audio tracks in the same way as MIDI tracks for editing. So much simpler!

Right, I’m off to polish my zimmer…

jblock

I recorded some albums only using the internal sequencer of a Roland XP-50 or Roland Fantom S. But like a lot of other folks here, I've used reel-to-reel, cassette, MiniDisc, DAT, and a CD recorder through the years.

jolico

@richardyot said:
In theory you could replicate the 4-track workflow in AUM, except you can't because you don't have fast-forward and rewind controls, so it's not practical to use as a virtual tape machine.

Actually you do:
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/43327/aum-audio-timeline

swarmboy

suffice to say, you spent many hours each morning with one of these...

richardyot

@jolico said:

@richardyot said:
In theory you could replicate the 4-track workflow in AUM, except you can't because you don't have fast-forward and rewind controls, so it's not practical to use as a virtual tape machine.

Actually you do:
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/43327/aum-audio-timeline

That only works per-channel though, doesn't it? You can't offset all the tracks together, so it's not really like a tape machine.

Krupa

I have a somewhat messily remembered notion of chalk marks on tape and really really not getting it from an early nineties music technology course in the north of England, I didn’t finish that one, got an Amiga and a copy of octamed instead 😁

Apex

@bygjohn said:

@Apex said:
It was done by using your ears not your eyes.

Still done nowadays to to some extent. Just look at the used prices for reel to reels (ATR’s) and cassette 4 tracks.... They’re through the roof. Still to this day nothing sounds quite as good as a high end tape machine being hit hard.

I find it quite amusing that there are so many tape emulation plugins trying to replicate all the stuff we wanted to get rid of when tape was the only option, eg hiss, warble, flutter, limited frequency response.

I worked with a friend who had a Tascam Portastudio for a while (previously I just bounced between two tape machines overdubbing stuff), then bought a Fostex cassette four track. I can remember getting really excited when I bought a Tascam tape sync unit, which meant I could synchronise the tape machine with Cubase on an Atari, though it meant losing one of the four tracks to do it. Basically it recorded a warbling tone on the track it used than encoded MIDI clock and song position pointers.

Audio recording going into DAWs was a revelation. You could just treat the audio tracks in the same way as MIDI tracks for editing. So much simpler!

Right, I’m off to polish my zimmer…

I never saw the appeal of cassette multitracks personally. But proper ATR’s (1/2” and up) truly sound amazing. Albeit a PITA to maintain. Even having something like a Studer 2 trk (1/4”) just as a “mastering deck” is awesome. They even double as pretty tape echoes.

ervin

An early attempt by the members of the Audiobus forum to create a visual timeline using advanced technologies of the day:

AudioGus

@purpan2 said:

@knewspeak said:

@sloJordan said:
Well for at least a hundred years there was the music written on staff paper. Which is totally still a visual timeline.

And before that it was passed generation to generation, seasoned with herb, mushroom and moulding wheat.

The Homeric epic poems were actually sung, in some fashion, and passed down through the centuries as song.

How did they get their voices in tune?

purpan2

@AudioGus said:

@purpan2 said:

@knewspeak said:

@sloJordan said:
Well for at least a hundred years there was the music written on staff paper. Which is totally still a visual timeline.

And before that it was passed generation to generation, seasoned with herb, mushroom and moulding wheat.

The Homeric epic poems were actually sung, in some fashion, and passed down through the centuries as song.

But how did they keep their voices in tune?

Αυτοτυνε, of course!

To be serious, though, nobody knows the melodies. We know the metre from the verse, but that’s it.

BiancaNeve

@anickt said:

@NeuM said:
I used to have one of these babies.

I made tons of music on this! 😢 I miss her. I’d love to see this exact machine as an app.

To answer the OP @tsamba - I listened to my music as I was making it. It was a totally different approach. Nothing to look at but levels. Everything else done by ear.

It used to be an app.
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjL_8TEmrXwAhWqVRUIHRaOCAQQwqsBMAB6BAgGEAM&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3QtOsFQhlk&usg=AOvVaw0XXwWIYbS1W21gsEnF038-

duncank

Back in the early 80s, we would club together and hire in a PortaStudio, a couple of synths and various bits of outboard gear, for the weekend.
That stuff wasn’t cheap then.
A guy would turn up in a van and drop it all off.
We’d stay up all weekend and the music became progressively more experimental and weird the more sleep deprived we became.
Good times.

sloJordan

@Svetlovska said:
@richardyot : Now that would be a good AUV3 for someone to develop: an AUM File Player replacement where each instance just functioned exactly like a single per channel reel to reel, synced to the AUM transport, with fast forward, reverse, punch in and out... You can already simulate tape spin up and slow down scrubbing by applying an LFO to the File Player rate as the track plays, so it might be possible... ?

I've feature-requested this to @j_liljedahl before maybe 6 months ago. I think it would benefit from being directly integrated into aum rather than a 3rd party auv3. The file player is already so close you just need to be able to use as an fx node, with additional features of overdub recording and switching playback between a monitor mode and the recorded audio. would be amazingly useful.

Fingolfinzz

@duncank said:
Back in the early 80s, we would club together and hire in a PortaStudio, a couple of synths and various bits of outboard gear, for the weekend.
That stuff wasn’t cheap then.
A guy would turn up in a van and drop it all off.
We’d stay up all weekend and the music became progressively more experimental and weird the more sleep deprived we became.
Good times.

Sleep deprivation music is a fun place. Plus it’s easier to fall asleep on than a hit of acid

JeffChasteen

@duncank said:
Back in the early 80s, we would club together and hire in a PortaStudio, a couple of synths and various bits of outboard gear, for the weekend.
That stuff wasn’t cheap then.
A guy would turn up in a van and drop it all off.
We’d stay up all weekend and the music became progressively more experimental and weird the more sleep deprived we became.
Good times.

Sounds like good times indeed!

ecamburn

Feel old reading this thread

JeffChasteen

@Svetlovska said:
In a former life as a music journalist I interviewed the late, and very great, Roy Orbison. I asked him about the difficulties of recording his masterpiece ‘In Dreams’. He explained that the main problem was fitting the string section, the backing singers and the band all in the room with him while they recorded it. Live. As a single take.

Excellent!

JeffChasteen

Svetlovska

@JeffChasteen : I don’t know... these LoFi hipsters really think they’re it, don’t they? I blame Boards Of Canada

bygjohn

@Apex said:
I never saw the appeal of cassette multitracks personally. But proper ATR’s (1/2” and up) truly sound amazing. Albeit a PITA to maintain. Even having something like a Studer 2 trk (1/4”) just as a “mastering deck” is awesome. They even double as pretty tape echoes.

Cost was the appeal. Though they weren’t cheap, they were cheaper than R2R, and could sound pretty good, particularly the double speed Tascams.

ruggedsmooth

I heard the really old guys use to chisel “808s” into the side of cave walls p, lol

I remember when my buddy gave me my first real DAW software, an old student copy of Cubasis/Nuendo.
Took me a month just to figure out how to work the piano roll or record midi, lol
Spend a whole week on one 8 bar drum track.
MusicSoftware was so alien at first, now it’s the opposite for the younger guys, the hardware is alien, and the software is second nature.

Edward_Alexander

@PhilW said:
Of course when recording on your 4-track in your bedroom (I had a Fostex), the tape counter was your friend, the closest you had to a timeline as you knew that the second verse started at a particular count, then the chorus at another count etc.

Same here. I was going to comment on the Tascam models posted above in that I had the same exact thing only it was Fostex brand.

Before that though I used a Fisher dual cassette boom box to record my guitar and my Casio keyboard I had when I was like 14. (I’m 51 now). It had an AUX audio input that I could run my guitar pedals into. I had two pedals, a BOSS Digital Delay and a BOSS Heavy Metal and to my 14 year old ears it sounded amazing going into this radio/boom box!

And, I figured out how to “multi-track” with this setup as I could record whatever on the first tape, then play that tape back and be able to record the AUX line in along with it onto the 2nd blank tape. Of course you could only do this with a regular cassette so much before the sound degrades totally, but I was doing it. Still have a few boxes of those old tapes!

michael_m

There was never a need for a visual timeline before computer recording - songs would be written before recording, and maybe even rewritten while playing them on the road. The only real change in the studio was arrangement changes.

Visual timelines are an add-on to the process, and totally not necessary for the majority of music.

JeffChasteen

@Svetlovska said:
@JeffChasteen : I don’t know... these LoFi hipsters really think they’re it, don’t they? I blame Boards Of Canada

🤣

Brad

The first time I went to a studio I was so young I didn’t even think about what we were recording on and honestly I don’t remember. But onece I was grown and started going to studios it was adat tapes (they look like vcr tapes and held 8 tracks a piece and they had 4 stacked and synced together for 32 tracks. Had to play all the parts out and have good timing. Then we just sequenced the parts by punching out where we didn’t want something or bring it back in where we did. I still have my adat tapes from my sessions. Then once done with a mix we recorded that over to a dat tape, which it like a mini vcr looking tape. Took that to a mastering engineer and he put it in cd for us. The first time I recorded on computer I was amazed!

Spidericemidas

I used a Fostex 4-Track tape recorder and counted the bars in my head to know where I was on the timeline for overdubbing things. Counting the bars was also required for live mixing when bouncing tracks 1, 2 and 3 onto track 4 to free up tracks 1, 2 and 3 again. A lot of patience, concentration and practise needed! Not to mention lots of takes and re-takes! It’s all ludicrously quicker and easier these days, thankfully. 😊

McD

In the 70's I had a friend with one of these:

He'd play bass and guitar tracks.

I'd add drums, keyboards and vocal and we'd produce "demos" of songs written
by songwriters that had more money than talent in Newport Beach, CA where Steve Bannon
lives now. The most expensive real estate in Orange County, CA. It paid pretty well for
2 starving college students and those terrible tunes haunt my dreams. Hooks that were
brain damaging...

"Spinning on a dime.
Spinning, spinning, spinning.
Spinning on a dime."

"Spinning, Spinning, spinning,
spinning, spinning, spinning, (fade out on heated spinning)."

That's pretty much all the wrote for lyrics... these 2 middle aged women
believed the hook made the tune and this was a pure brain worm with a
steel barbed hook in the center.

The bass part was that disco octave jumping pattern that was huge in disco circles. The drums were similar to that Shaft 16th note hi-hat to snare beat
with 4 on the kick. We stretched the basic concept to 3 minutes of Top 40
precision.

I'd pay to have these dendrites removed. It's why I drink to excess.

I got about $500 because they paid for 3-4 versions thinking they really had a potential hit. Each version added something new inspired by current Disco hits. But the tape started to show it's limitations with bouncing tracks. The more we added the worse the recording got... so we'd drop the old and lay it all down again with the most important parts added last... like that stellar vocal hook.

They followed this gem with a Patriotic classic called "Here Comes the Parade". I took a shot at a piccolo solo but not having a piccolo and we dropped the tape speed by 1/2. I just didn't have the chops to get the John Phillip Sousa feeling they were seeking.

"Spinning, spinning spinning"... just shoot me... it's back.

j_liljedahl

When I was a kid I had a double cassette boombox similar to this:

It had a mic mix input so you could play one tape and record it + the mic onto the second tape. Then just swap tapes and do it again, etc The problem was that the two decks had a small difference in tape speed, so for each swap the song was tuned lower and lower! Luckily my moms DX7 had a tune parameter to compensate, but it was a pain to retune the guitar.

jolico

@j_liljedahl said:
When I was a kid I had a double cassette boombox similar to this:

It had a mic mix input so you could play one tape and record it + the mic onto the second tape. Then just swap tapes and do it again, etc The problem was that the two decks had a small difference in tape speed, so for each swap the song was tuned lower and lower! Luckily my moms DX7 had a tune parameter to compensate, but it was a pain to retune the guitar.

I used to create loops with those by hitting rewind & play in time with the beat while recording.

I remember recording my voice in “LongPlay” so that it would be pitched lower at normal play speed.

Good times