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Sitting here in my living room in front of the Roland VS-880EX—a portable digital multitrack studio housed in a gray box barely bigger than the open pages of the magazine you're holding—it's either depressing or inspiring to recall the home studio my brother and I assembled a dozen years ago. Thankfully, I've forgotten the total price that we paid for that rack-mounted four-track cassette recorder, the rack itself, the eight-channel mixer, the reverb and delay units, the fancy power amp that never stopped buzzing (except at the repair shop, the mix-down cassette deck . . . but I'm sure it wasn't far from what all-in-one units like this Roland cost these days. What I do remember is our recording sessions with that cumbersome four-track rig, in which we captured output from questionable microphones onto hissy cassettes and then bounced and mixed tracks until the whole thing sounded like the old steam radiators in our parents' house accompanied by the distant strains of a familiar song. The contrast with my experience tonight truly boggles my mind. With no guidance except the manual, I sat down with this box for the first time and quickly managed to play back and goof around with the mixes of the prerecorded demo songs that Roland supplies. Then I learned to navigate through songs and tracks and discovered the no-rewinding joys of instant digital access. And within a few hours I was familiar enough with the basic functions to actually start playing music—recording guitar, voice, and percussion tracks onto the hard disk and achieving shockingly good sounds by doing nothing more than pointing a decent mic in the general direction of whatever noise I was making. Along with the VS-880EX, my grand recording studio consists of the following: Shure condenser mic, Radio Shack boom stand, and XLR-to-quarter-inch mic cable plugging directly into the VS-880EX. For playback, an RCA cord runs from the VS-880EX to my home stereo, to which I've rigged my old Yamaha NS-10M studio monitors along with my regular living-room speakers. Plus I've got a pair of Sony Professional stereo headphones, which is mainly what I'm using to listen back since the apartment walls are thin and the rest of the household is asleep. It's late but I'm feeling a surge of energy, plotting out a long-pondered recording project that suddenly seems to be right at my fingertips: capturing good, clean versions of my best songs, on my own turf in my own time. That possibility is reason enough to celebrate, but if I manage to get a handle on the Roland's built-in effects, mix-down functions, and optional CD burner, my songs can actually ride the digital highway right into my CD player! And here's the kicker: with current street prices as low as $2,300 for the VS-880EX and its CD recorder, this entire recording rig could be assembled from the ground up for well under $3,000—even subbing in a spiffier mic or two. Before I embark on this project—and share my experiences with you—I need to make a few confessions about my history as a "recording artist." In addition to my exercises in four-track frustration, I've been involved in various recording situations that have been hampered by either limited gear or limited time. I love the idea of recording as a creative outlet for original music, but the reality I've known often seems like a cross between waiting in the airport for a delayed flight and assembling cheap Scandinavian furniture from incomprehensible directions. Though not a technophobe, I do my best to avoid things like patch cords and effects parameters. In other words, I'm not exactly the guy voted most likely to succeed as a recording engineer. But something about this new era of digital home recording seems genuinely different from what I've known, and it emboldens me to try. DEFINING THE PROJECT First I choose 12 songs I want to do, all of which lend themselves to simple arrangements—solo guitar and voice or duets, augmented in a few cases by overdubs of vocal harmonies, percussion, and lead guitar. For both philosophical and pragmatic reasons, I aim only to faithfully capture the sounds of acoustic instruments in a room, not to create some sort of alternate reality. I figure I'll record without effects or EQ, adding reverb and whatever else at mix-down time—the less, the better. I already have a head start with some of these tunes: earlier this year, I did a live-to-DAT session in the living room that was my most successful recording effort to date and the inspiration for checking out the possibilities of digital multitracking. Although I loved the clarity and immediacy of live-to-two-track recording, in some cases it would have been nice to save an otherwise great take by making a simple level adjustment after the fact, or else to add an extra harmony part, a subtle shaker. . . . I want to try transferring the best of those DAT tracks onto the VS-880EX and working with them there, in addition to doing other songs from scratch. With eight playback tracks plus 128 virtual tracks (for storing alternate takes and such), and a huge bank of effects, the VS-880EX offers far more sonic possibilities than I need. Knowing that endless options can lead to pointless futzing, I take a pledge: No just-'cause-I-can overdubbing, editing, or over-the-top perfectionism. Not fully trusting myself on this count, I also assign myself a firm deadline: the finished product has to be ready for delivery in some form in six weeks' time. FIRST TRACKS When I sit down to start tracking for real, I've upgraded one critical part of my setup by borrowing three killer mics from a friend—a pair of Neumann KM 184s and an Audio-Technica 4050 (street prices around $600 a piece). He uses the former all the time for acoustic guitar, the latter for vocals and whatever else, with consistently great results. These mics do require phantom power, though, which the VS-880EX's mixer doesn't have (although its 16-track sibling, the VS-1680, does). But my friend is kind enough to part with his compact Mackie 1402VLZ mixer for a few days, which I'll use only to power the mics. Another box and a few more cords, but still a pretty darn compact studio. Fortunately I'm also equipped with idiot-proof instructions for setting up the mics. The Audio-Technica, which came with a screen for those pesky p's and windy s's, goes just a few inches away from my face; the Neumanns make a V shape about a foot away, so that one mic is pointed at about the 14th fret of my guitar, the other at the bridge. (I plan to play and sing at the same time as much as possible—separating them tends to make my guitar parts fussy and groove deficient.) On the Roland's mixer, assigning these inputs to the right tracks is basically a matter of punching buttons above the faders while keeping an eye on the little display—pretty straightforward. There's a function called EZ routing that is supposed to make this process, well, EZ-er, but since I've gotten by without it so far, I won't mess with success. In getting around the VS-880EX, a little computer aptitude goes a long way. Because so many functions are crammed into so little space, buttons do double duty or more—you frequently need to hold down the shift button, as on a computer keyboard, to access a second function, or else press a button numerous times to toggle through its menu. The time/value wheel is your tool for changing all sorts of settings, whether it's adjusting a reverb level or choosing a letter of the alphabet while inputting the name of your song. Saving and retrieving songs is very much like on a DOS-era computer—one file open at a time. I definitely need the manual to figure out how to do things, but the learning curve is not outrageously steep given the complexity of what's going on under the hood. I might not have offered that opinion last night, though, when all my recording efforts were foiled by the fader/edit button, which switches among the input mixer, the track mixer, and the effects return mixer. As I learned the hard way, this unassuming little button has the power to prevent your lovely take from getting to the track where it appears to be heading. And no matter how vehemently you curse, it will not switch on its own to the correct setting. Anyway, tonight things are going much better, and in my first test of the new mic setup, the guitar sounds as clear and natural as could be. Also reproduced in exacting detail is that little nasal exhale I did before the opening chord, and the shifting of my leg on the chair sounds like an alpine avalanche! Even though the first test was promising, I feel as if I should do some of that enlightened experimenting and comparative listening that all the recording gurus talk about. So I try a few other mic placements, but none really seem better than my first shot. Time to play. Over the next week, I lay down solo and duo versions of numerous songs, working mostly for an hour or two after my daughter goes to bed and before I get too exhausted. When I'm done for the night, I have to move my recording table and dismantle the mics so the living room can function again as a living room, but it only takes me about 15 minutes to get ready to hit the record button again. I wind up using different mic setups on different days. Sometimes I record the guitar in stereo with both Neumanns, sometimes with one Neumann while the other is used for my brother's guitar or uke, and these setups work equally well. For percussion overdubs, I use various mics, including my own Shure. At one point, I have only one of the borrowed mics—the Audio-Technica—and after several weak attempts to do separate guitar and vocal tracks, I just set it up at chest height about two feet away to see if I can do both on one track. I'm doing a brand-new song that I barely know, but my first take goes beautifully—in sound and feel. The magic of a good microphone and unself-conscious playing. Even though the VS-880EX offers slick, automated punch-in capabilities, I prefer to do full takes rather than getting sucked into that vortex of fixing little notes and phrases. Of course, this means accepting—even embracing—the glitches, either human (like that guiro-like noise that happened when my brother's ring caught on his guitar string and then rattled against the frets as he tried to remove it) or environmental (like those trucks that always drive by right when I play my closing chord). Along with my new tracks, I transfer selections from my old DATs to the VS-880EX without too much trouble, running a regular RCA cord into the VS-880's coaxial input. The DAT's left channel goes to track one, the right to channel two, leaving me with the option of adjusting those as well as overdubbing parts on the other six tracks. Hearing the clean digital sound transfer to hard disk without degrading is a pure joy after working with cassettes all those years. DEALING WITH DATA While I'm happily tracking away, the 2.1-gigabyte hard disk that came with this version of the VS-880 is filling up fast. I've been using the default MT1 recording mode, which compresses the data without altering the sound in any way that I can hear; the uncompressed mastering mode eats up the hard drive much faster. I've been living dangerously so far, without backing up my songs, and I really need to take care of that now before Murphy's Law kicks in. In the manual, Roland recommends a Zip drive for backup, although I gather that the first-generation 100-MB Zips don't hold much data—even a four-minute song might not fit on one $20 disk. (The newer 250-MB Zips are a big improvement.) Other options include Jaz disks, which fit 1 gigabyte but cost around $100 each; DATs (a 64-minute tape sells for around $8); CD-Rs, which hold 650 MB and are dirt cheap (as low as $1 apiece) but can only be written once—except for the much more expensive CD-RWs (around $12 apiece). Or you could use some sort of external hard drive. The question of how to manage hefty audio files seems to be an obsession for everyone who works with hard-disk recording. I'd like to use the rewritable CD drive that came with this Roland, but it can't do either incremental or selective backups. A DAT machine is readily available, so I give that a whirl. It isn't fast—a two-minute, two-track song takes just over one minute to back up, but a five-minute, seven-track opus takes 14 minutes. So DAT probably isn't the best backup device, but it does work without a hitch, and nine of my songs fit on one tape. And later, when I need to restore some songs from DAT that I've nervously deleted from the hard disk, that works too. CUT AND PASTE My songs are really starting to come together, but there's one duet that's eluding me. The best take by far has a fatal flaw: somehow, idiotically, I lopped off the last three seconds. And it's not a fade-out kind of song, either—it has a definite, punchy ending that you can hear coming a mile away. It was a hard song to nail, and I really don't want to rerecord it, but I don't want to drop it either. I do have another take recorded right before it, though, with seemingly the same levels and a clean ending. Could I manage to copy the good ending onto the good take using the VS-880EX's editing capabilities? I know it's possible, but I'm highly skeptical of my ability to pull it off, especially because the strumming is continuous throughout the section in question—there's no handy pause. Here's how I try. Both versions of the song are on DAT. First I copy the good take onto two tracks of the VS-880EX, then I copy the good ending onto the same two tracks about ten seconds after the first take ends. The best splicing point, I figure, is after the singing ends and a split second before the final lead guitar lick begins. I've got to copy exactly the right section of the ending onto exactly that spot so that the ending is in time with the rest of the song and you can't hear any notes being clipped off or appearing out of nowhere. The VS-880 offers many ways to mark time locations in songs for this and other purposes. The way I do it is to hit the tap button while the track is playing, which marks a location that's at least close to the magic one, and that number can then be easily entered into the copy function. From there, I can move the location in increments of a frame (1/30 of a second) using the time/value wheel. So I select which tracks should be copied and to where, enter in the locations I've marked, and trepidatiously press yes when it asks me, "TRK Track Copy OK?" I listen to the results and find that I am fairly close. I seem to have copied the right section of the ending, but there's a weird hiccup in the rhythm that indicates that I placed it too early. So I hit undo (what a wondrous key to have while recording!), move the destination time a little bit later, and try again. Still not right. The process continues for four or five rounds: copy, listen, undo, adjust. Finally, I move the destination time just two frames further, listen back, and can't believe my ears. I loop it again and again and again, trying to hear a blip of some sort, but I can't find one. It's totally seamless! What luck: we played the two versions at the same tempo and the same volume with more or less the same rhythm guitar pattern! I save my work to disk with a huge grin on my face. This editing success inspires me to try a few other things as my project continues. Through the same trial-and-error process, I manage to append an intro onto the beginning of one song (I had forgotten to play it, but it comes up again later in the song, so I nabbed it from there). With another copy and paste, I also save a good performance that was ruined by a flubbed chord at the very end. Three for three! Then I try unsuccessfully to move one lagging frame-drum beat and realize I'm beginning to violate my anti-perfectionism vow. So I stop myself before I edit again—a good idea anyway, since my deadline is approaching, and I've got plenty of work still to do. EFFECTS AND MIXING Mix-down is when I really see the benefits of starting this process with great mics and doing things as live as possible. Most of what I have to do is just find the right levels, which usually don't need to be adjusted in midsong (so I don't bother to investigate the VS-880EX's automated mix functions). I love being able to mark the precise location just before the music begins so I can cut extraneous setup noises right out of the mix. I don't get far into this machine's universe of effects, which includes the things you would expect (EQ, reverb, chorus, delay, compression) along with algorithms that promise to emulate various amps, speakers, and microphones (turn your Shure SM-57 into a high-end condenser mic!) and to adapt your voice or guitar for any genre (will that be Metal Jet, Blues Drv., Liverpool, or Country?). My effects desires are humble and lead me only to some subtle reverb and a bit of compression. At this stage, I can apply only two effects to all the channels; now I understand why you'd want to record with effects—you can use many more specialized sounds that way. I'm much less confident of my judgment in effects and mixing than I was with the recording itself. What sounds really wet in the headphones sounds pretty dry in the speakers, and what sounded rocking last night sounds wimpy today. I also know that skillfully used compression would help the songs pop more. More expertise and another set of ears would come in very handy right now, but I press on and do the best I can. I try the trick of listening from the other room, just to hear what cuts through the mixes at a remove. Is the voice up front enough? How about the faux bass line I did by tuning my sixth string an octave below the fifth? Most of my initial mixes seem OK, and I wind up only remixing a few songs. BURN, BABY, BURN Next comes an eagerly awaited step: assembling the songs and burning a real CD. To do this, I first have to clear out enough space on the hard disk to accommodate a "song" that is composed of all 12 of my songs, in order. As instructed in the manual, I copy the songs onto tracks seven and eight from my mix-down DAT. In the process I discover that one song has a digital drop-out (a little missing blip of sound), so I do need to go back and remix that one before I can proceed. When all the songs are assembled, I use the editing functions to cut space between songs down to what I want for the final CD. Now that I'm familiar with how to mark locations and use them in editing, this is an easy and fun process, as is putting in the song markers (which tell your CD player where track two begins, etc.). Unfortunately, at this point it's not possible—or not easy, anyway—to adjust the relative levels of the songs. But I figure I'll just burn a CD and see how it comes out. I get a shot of adrenaline when I hit yes to start the process of writing a CD, but it begins to fade when, ten minutes later, the screen tells me the process is still only two percent complete. Nearly two and a half hours pass before the conversion and writing is complete, but everything appears to work fine. All that's left is to finalize the CD, which takes only a couple of minutes. I excitedly pop the disc into my CD player, only to be greeted with a row of zeros indicating that my shiny disc is, as far as my player is concerned, useless. (Later I learn that rewritable CDs generally play only on rewritable CD drives.) Chastened, I start the process over with a regular CD-R and head to sleep—I can't wait around for another two and a half hours. At 6 A.M. I pop awake and head straight for the VS-880, finalize the disc, and put it into the CD player, bracing for a second round of failure. But there are my numbers 1–12 in bright orange light, along with the beautiful total time count of 47:38! Call me a digital yokel, but that sight is an absolute thrill, and even better is flipping around my tracks, watching their seconds tick along as I've watched countless other CDs do for so many years. POLISHING AND PRESSING In the next couple of days a few friends assure me that I'm not fooling myself—my CD does, in fact, sound good. There are, of course, things that I'd love to improve, but I've come too far now and won't turn back. I'd like to get at least a dozen of these discs done to give to friends and family—not enough to send to a duplicator, but too many to do at two and a half hours a pop. So with further advice from computer-savvy musicians (oh, I get by with a little help from my friends), I set up to burn CDs on a computer at work, with a CD-R drive that cranks them out at 4x speed. (I could actually hook up Roland's CD drive to a computer, but the model I have only works at 2x.) First my original CD gets copied onto yet another hard disk. Then a program called Jam allows me to normalize the levels (making each song as hot as it can be without distorting) and easily make the track-to-track level adjustments that the VS-880 isn't really equipped to do. The overall CD is still not as loud and sparkling as a professionally recorded and professionally mastered CD would be, but I'm tickled at my layman's ability to have any tools like this at my disposal. When I originally conceived of this project, I planned to do some very simple cover for it—maybe even handwritten. But along the way I got wind of the fact that a company called Neato makes blank CD booklets, tray cards, and disc labels; you can design all these things using templates and then crank them out on an ink-jet or laser printer. I'm no graphic designer, but at this point I'm giddy with this self-reliance thing, so I buy the blanks and download MediaFace, Neato's free design software, off the Web (www.neato.com). Then I con a designer friend into scanning some photos for me, and I start playing with pictures and type (I even download a free, hip typewriter-style font from the Web). This turns out to be a much bigger project than I anticipated, and I run into plenty of difficulties in designing and printing (I would have been much better off using Neato's templates in Quark XPress rather than MediaFace). But I do get it done eventually, and one frenzied Saturday afternoon I turn into a one-man CD factory: burning CDs on one computer while printing booklets and labels on another. I'd hardly recommend this manufacturing method to anyone, but by late afternoon I have 15 completed CDs, full color artwork and everything. POWER UP It's now several months later, and the surprise that I managed to create my extremely limited-edition CD more or less single-handedly has worn off. I've recovered from my maniacal mission and caught up on my sleep, and now I'm taking stock of what I did and didn't accomplish. I didn't become a star, I didn't achieve immortality, and I didn't shake the foundations of the record business with my indie uprising. But I did capture something of my music that I can share with people who may never hear me perform, and that I could easily refine, master, and produce on a larger scale. I did figure out how to tackle an ambitious musical project on top of my already full life, on an extremely limited budget. And most importantly, I did find a way to make the technology serve my musical needs, rather than the other way around. Along the way, I also learned that the VS-880EX is just one option in the exploding world of digital home recording. There are several other portable studios with similar capabilities, plus an array of minidisc, ADAT, and computer-based systems, all of which are getting more versatile and less expensive even as I write. Each technology has its advantages and proponents, but the bottom line is this: it's never been easier or cheaper to do high-quality recording at home. A new kind of power has shifted into musicians' hands, and I, for one, intend to use it. This story appears in Acoustic Guitar July 1999, #79. That issue also includes a buyer's guide to portable digital multitrack recorders and computer-based systems.
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