Personal Digital Studios

The stand-alone recorders profiled in this month’s cover story offer an ideal solution for many musicians who want to record. But they’re complex devices. If you haven’t worked with one before, your first encounter may leave your head spinning.

Reading the manual will help a lot — but let’s see if we can sort through the confusion. Tabletop recorders have three main sections: an input section, a recording section, and a mixing section. The input section receives electrical signals from the outside world. The recording section stores the signals on a computer-type hard drive. On playback, the mixing section allows you to make your recorded tracks louder or softer and add effects so as to create a good-sounding final product.

INS (ALSO OUTS)

Along the upper edge or on the rear panel (see Figure 1), a recorder has rows of input jacks. These are of two types: Quarter-inch (1/4") jacks normally accept line-level signals, such as those coming from keyboards. Three-pin XLR jacks are designed for the lower-level signals coming from microphones, or direct boxes (DI boxes). An internal preamplifier boosts the mic-level signals so that they can be recorded properly. Most tabletop recorders also have a low-level, high-impedance input that you can plug an electric guitar into.

The number of tracks that can play back at once may be larger than the number of input channels. In this case, you would typically record some basic tracks first (such as the rhythm section) and then overdub additional tracks. In overdubbing, you record a new track while listening to the existing tracks.

Tabletop recorders provide all sorts of useful tools for editing tracks once they have been recorded. One of the most important tools is the existence of virtual tracks. Typically, each playback track is part of a group of eight or more virtual tracks. After recording a pretty good solo on track 5, for instance, you can bring up another virtual track (still on track 5) and try the solo again. Your new recording doesn’t replace the previous one — they exist side by side on the hard drive. They’re called “virtual” tracks because only one track in each group can be listened to or recorded to at any given time. A 16-track recorder, for instance, might have 16 real tracks but a total of 128 virtual tracks (16 x 8).

MIXING

There are many ways to record. A whole band can be recorded at once, with each instrument assigned to a separate track, or you can build up a multi-layered recording one track at a time, adding the drums, bass, keys, and vocals yourself. Either way, you end up with a bunch of tracks, all of them playing back at once. (The parts with flubbed notes can be erased or muted.) Now it’s time to mix.

In mixing, you raise or lower the faders on the recorder’s top panel to adjust the volume level of each track, so that each is in the foreground or background as needed. Tracks can be panned left or right in the stereo field to provide a better sense of separation and space. The tone color of each track can be fine-tuned with equalization (EQ). Effects such as reverb and compression can be added to individual tracks, or to the whole mix. Tabletop recorders provide built-in EQ and effects processors, which can be tweaked as needed.

In addition, tracks can be faded in or out during playback. To do this, you record automation data, usually by moving the faders while the music plays.

When your mix is perfected, you can record it to a special stereo track in the recorder. The music on this stereo track can then be burned to a standard audio CD using the built-in CD-RW drive.